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Shehbaz Departs Turkiye After COP31Pakistan
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif flew home from Antalya after addressing the COP31 summit and holding talks with several world leaders on its sidelines.
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Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif left Antalya for Pakistan on Thursday after attending the COP31 Leaders’ Summit in Turkiye, bringing his visit to the Turkish city to a close. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, Turkiye’s Deputy Minister of Environment, Hasan Suver, saw him off at Antalya airport as he boarded his flight home.
The prime minister had travelled to Antalya to represent Pakistan at the summit of the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where leaders from around the world gathered to discuss the response to a warming planet. During his stay, he addressed the leaders’ gathering and held a series of meetings on the sidelines with counterparts from several countries.
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In his address to the summit, the prime minister pressed the case for climate finance that does not add to the debt burden of vulnerable countries. According to reports of his speech, he called for grant-based support, including through public-private partnerships, and for a substantial increase in funding for resilience and adaptation, describing such funds as a matter of survival for struggling economies.
He reminded the gathering of the floods that struck Pakistan in 2022, which affected around 33 million people, and pointed out that Pakistan accounts for less than one per cent of global carbon emissions. He urged world leaders to judge the outcome of COP31 by practical achievements rather than by political promises.
Meetings on the sidelines
On the sidelines of the conference, the prime minister met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The two leaders discussed trade and investment, defence cooperation, energy and connectivity, and stressed the need to speed up work already under way between the two countries. President Erdogan also appreciated Pakistan’s mediation efforts, which led to the signing of the Islamabad memorandum of understanding.
The prime minister also met Finnish President Alexander Stubb, with the two sides discussing a forward-looking partnership covering trade and investment, education, skills development, technology, climate resilience and contacts between people. He repeated his invitation to the Finnish president to visit Pakistan. He further met the president of Iraq and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council.
He was accompanied during the visit by Senator Sherry Rehman, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar and the prime minister’s adviser Tariq Fatemi. On his arrival in Antalya, he had been received by Turkiye’s Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism, Gokhan Yazgi, and Pakistan’s ambassador-designate to Turkiye, Amna Baloch. A Pakistan Pavilion was also set up at the summit venue, hosting 54 events during the conference.
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