Coal, cancer and Cop31: How Turkey’s drive to expand a major coal plant is polluting its climate push

Résumé détaillé

Residents around the Afşin-Elbistan coal plant believe it has killed family members, leaving a ghost town as people have been forced away. As Turkey welcomes world leaders to Cop31, a reliance on fossil fuels – with little end in sight – is severely undermining its climate credentials. Liz Cookman reports

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On the veranda of a small house, Omer coughs as his wife serves up sweet tea and biscuits. The golden glow of late-afternoon sun peaks through nearby foliage and scatters across the floor – an idyllic scene, perhaps, but for a swell of black smoke pooling in the sky over us.

All day – and some say at night, too – emissions chug out in huge columns from alternating chimneys at the nearby Afşin-Elbistan coal plant. It leaves the air all around the surrounding plateau, in Turkey’s southern Kahramanmaraş region, feeling dry and heavy in the mouth and lungs.

Now in his late fifties, Omer has worked at the vast plant for years, as well as living a stone's throw from it. His brothers also worked there, but in recent years, three have died – two from lung cancer and one of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a progressive lung condition that can be caused or worsened by long-term exposure to coal fumes.

“I believe working at this plant killed them,” says Omer, pointing his finger towards it in indignation. “And I’m not going to see 65, I know that.”

Another brother is also living with COPD and asthma. According to Omer, his late brothers were between 55 and 61 when they died, and there was no previous history of these illnesses in his family. His father – who was also born in the village – lived to 97.

Turkey is set to host world leaders over the next couple of days in the southern coastal city of Antalya, as part of the Cop31 summit. Under an unusual power-sharing arrangement with Australia, who will lead the formal negotiations, the country has said it will attempt to turn previous pledges – such as the landmark Paris Agreement – into measurable policy.

Speaking on Monday as the summit opened, leaders urged the world to accelerate the fight against global warming in a year of climate-driven disasters that is also on track to be one of the four…

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