COP31 in Antalya

01 · The host

Twelve days in November, and the world at one address

From 9 to 20 November 2026, Antalya hosts COP31, the thirty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Around a hundred thousand people are expected: delegations from the 197 countries that are parties to the UN climate convention, alongside scientists, journalists, businesses, city leaders and students.

The conference is held at the Antalya EXPO Center in Aksu, east of the city, a few minutes from the airport and on the road to Belek.

It works in two parts. The Blue Zone is where accredited delegations negotiate. The Green Zone faces the public, with exhibitions, pavilions, workshops and cultural events.

02 · The meeting

What a COP is

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, countries adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The countries that joined it are called its Parties. Once a year they meet at a Conference of the Parties: a COP.

The first was held in Berlin in 1995. Since then the meeting has moved around the world, from Kyoto to Paris, Glasgow, Dubai, Baku and Belém.

Antalya’s is the thirty-first.

This one has an unusual shape. Türkiye hosts and presides over the conference, Australia chairs the negotiations, and the meetings before it are held in the Pacific. So the road to Antalya starts on the other side of the world.

03 · A city that receives

Antalya has been receiving delegations for two thousand years

A conference of a hundred thousand people is new. A visit from the world is not.

In AD 130 the emperor Hadrian came, and the city built a triple-arched marble gate for him. It still stands, and people still walk through it.

In November 2015, the leaders of the G20 met in Belek, a short drive from where COP31 is held. Less than a month later, in Paris, the world adopted the Paris Agreement.

In 2016 Antalya held a six-month EXPO on a site in Aksu. Its theme was flowers and children, and its motto was A Green World for the Coming Generations. About four and a half million people came.

Those grounds are where COP31 is held. The EXPO Tower still rises over them, 100.7 meters tall, drawn in the shape of a peony whose three leaves echo Hadrian’s three arches.

Since 2021, the Antalya Diplomacy Forum has brought ministers and heads of state to the same coast almost every year.

04 · The coast they will see

What the delegates will see when they look up from the table

A delegate walking out of the conference hall in Aksu is twenty minutes from a Roman theater and a few minutes from the sea.

To the north, the Taurus Mountains. In November there may already be snow on the high peaks.

To the south, the Mediterranean, still warm enough in November for a swim.

Along the Belek shore, loggerhead turtles come ashore every summer to lay their eggs in the sand. By November the last hatchlings have long since made for the sea.

East of the venue stands Perge, where a woman named Plancia Magna paid for the city gate in the second century. Further on is Aspendos, where a Roman theater still stages opera on summer nights.

In the orchards around the city, the orange harvest is beginning.

05 · The welcome

A city that knows how to host

Antalya receives millions of visitors every year. It is one of the most visited places on the Mediterranean, and its airport is among the busiest in Türkiye.

That is the ordinary work of this place: the hotels, the drivers, the kitchens, the guides, the people who fix the air conditioning at two in the morning.

For twelve days in November, all of that turns toward one conference.

Most people who come for COP31 will see Antalya in one of two ways: from a conference hall or from a car window. We would like them to see a little more.

06 · What stays

A conference ends. The name stays.

Every COP leaves its city’s name behind. People who have never read a climate text know the words Kyoto and Paris.

From November 2026, Antalya joins that list.

What the negotiators decide is for the negotiators. What we can keep is the memory of the place: the hall on the old EXPO grounds, the tower shaped like a flower, the walk to the sea at the end of a long day.

07 · Why it is on a shirt

Something to take home from twelve days in Antalya

People who come to a conference go home with a badge, a lanyard and a bag of papers. Very few go home with anything of the place.

That is what these collections are for. Each design is about Antalya: its harbor, its gate, its tower, its turtles, its oranges, its mountains. Each one carries the name of the place and the month it hosted the world.

They are drawn by designers who live here. They are for the delegates who came, for the people of Antalya who hosted them, and for anyone who followed from further away.

None of it is official merchandise, and none of it pretends to be. It is a souvenir of a place, made in that place.