Turkish giant sponsoring COP31 cut climate goals then cashed in on oil boom

When the Turkish COP31 presidency presented its priorities to international business leaders for the first time in New York in September, among those invited to give the private sector’s first response was Ali Koç, scion of one of Türkiye’s wealthiest families.

On stage, the vice chair of the board of Koç Holding said the family company, which weeks earlier had been announced as one of the top sponsors for the UN climate summit, can be seen as “quite exemplary” for its climate record.

What Koç did not mention was that the group’s biggest money-making arm – Türkiye’s largest oil refiner Tüpraş – plans to keep running its refineries “at maximum potential”. Nor did he say that, in 2025, both parent company and subsidiary cut their 2030 climate targets to a level they had already nearly achieved, as Climate Home News’ analysis of company records reveals.

The decision to hand Koç Holding a prominent role at COP31 – the company is also the summit’s “Global Business Partner” – has reignited a long-running controversy over the platforming of fossil fuel interests at the annual UN climate conference.

It has also thrown into question how COP sponsors are chosen and screened. The hosting agreement between the Turkish government and the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC) says that a partner company’s “climate integrity” should be taken into account.

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But how that test is applied is unclear and the process for picking sponsors remains largely opaque. The Turkish COP31 presidency has not published its selection criteria, nor the financial terms of any of its partnership agreements, including Koç’s. The UNFCCC declined to clarify how it advises on such deals.

Campaigners have long argued that accepting sponsorship from polluting companies is wrong because it gives them a global stage, visibility and access to policymakers at talks that are meant to move the world away from fossil fuels, and tarnishes the reputation of the COPs.

Koç’s energy division, which is dominated by oil refiner Tüpraş, accounted for three-quarters of the parent firm’s income in the first half of 2026.

“How was Koç Holding ever chosen as a COP31 sponsor? Any corporation that makes most of its money from oil refining should not qualify as sustainable,” said Pascoe Sabido, a campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory, which exposes company lobbying. “This is hugely embarrassing for the UNFCCC and its climate integrity check, which doesn’t appear to be worth the paper it’s written on.”

Koç Holding “is not just standing still but walking backwards”, he told Climate Home News.

Koç Holding and Tüpraş did not reply to multiple requests for comment. The UNFCCC secretariat and the Turkish COP31 presidency declined to respond to questions from Climate Home News on the sponsorship agreement.

Oil refining windfall

Türkiye’s biggest industrial group, Koç Holding has stakes in several key sectors of the economy, spanning vehicle manufacturing in a joint venture with Ford to electronics, home appliances and banking.

But the conglomerate’s crown jewel is oil refiner Tüpraş, which Koç controls. Last year its four refineries turned crude oil into 26.8 million tonnes of petrol, diesel, jet fuel and other products, enough to fill about 36 Olympic swimming pools every day.

The company plans to raise its production to 29 million tonnes in 2026 – already a bumper year so far with soaring profits, thanks to sky-rocketing refining margins driven by a crunch in global oil processing capacity caused by the Middle East crisis.

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The oil business boom sits awkwardly with the climate and energy transition plans Koç and Tüpraş unveiled in 2021, when both pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050. Then, Tüpraş set out its aim to become “a leading carbon-neutral energy company”.

Despite these promises, in 2025, both companies lowered their targets for cutting emissions from their own operations by 2030, from 27% to 20% below 2017 levels. Tüpraş also cut its 2035 goal from 35% to 25%. The company still technically retains its long-term target of carbon neutrality by 2050, but the new plan will require much more drastic cuts after 2035.

Lowering the climate bar

Tüpraş blamed its weakening of climate ambition on “changing market dynamics, economic conditions and technological developments”. In a presentation announcing the revision to investors, the refiner said the energy outlook had changed since 2021.

The reasons it listed included elevated geopolitical tensions, increased investment in oil and gas extraction, which it said showed refined fuels remain vital for energy security – and even the depletion of the carbon budget to keep global warming to 1.5C.

Its parent company Koç pointed the finger at the slow pace of green hydrogen development, which the group said now had a “low feasibility” of transforming the energy sector after it had previously pinned much of its transition plan on the sustainable fuel.

The Turkish company’s new 2030 targets are certainly within reach. Tüpraş had already cut its operational emissions by 17% from 2017 levels by 2025, with nearly all of that progress achieved before the transition plan was unveiled, while Koç had reduced them by 16%.

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The softer targets also exclude the bulk of the group’s climate impact. Most of its emissions come not from its own refineries and factories but from the products it sells: petrol, diesel and jet fuel burned in the engines of cars or planes.

These so-called Scope 3 emissions make up about 97% of Koç’s carbon footprint. They rose by around a sixth between 2019 and 2024, and neither Koç nor Tüpraş has set a target to cut them.

Efe Baysal, Türkiye team lead at campaign group 350.org, said there is a “clear contradiction” between talking about climate action while weakening emission targets and seeing emissions from the use of petroleum products keep rising.

“If the company is serious about the transition, it needs a clear plan to wind down fossil fuel operations, rather than relying on efficiency measures and technologies that let business as usual continue,” she told Climate Home News.

‘Sustainable refining’ push

Tüpraş’s updated transition plan rules out expanding its oil refineries, but commits to “maintaining the existing capacity” and running it “at maximum potential”. Oil refining is expected to remain its main source of earnings for years to come. Koç listed “growing oil demand and diesel deficit” in Türkiye as a competitive advantage for its energy business in a pitch to investors last month.

The biggest component of the Tüpraş transition plan is what the company calls “sustainable refining”. It plans to invest $3.9 billion between 2025 and 2035 in programmes to modernise its refineries, improve their energy efficiency and bring down the direct emissions they generate. The company is also shifting some of its production to petrochemicals, which it expects to reduce its Scope 3 emissions.

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Alongside these “sustainable refining” efforts, Tüpraş is also investing in renewable power.

Four years ago, it bought Entek, which produces electricity primarily from six hydropower plants and one gas plant. Since the acquisition, Tüpraş has started building a utility-scale solar farm in Romania and a wind power plant with storage in Türkiye, alongside smaller solar energy installations at some of its refineries. A dozen more renewable energy projects are currently in the pipeline, according to its latest annual report.

In a self-declared bid to become “Türkiye’s leading producer of zero-carbon electricity”, Tüpraş wants to reach installed capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 – a target it raised in its updated plan – and 2.5GW by 2035. The Turkish government has committed to rolling out 120GW of wind and solar capacity nationwide by then.

Setback for green fuels

Tüpraş plans to supply most of its low-carbon electricity to run its future production plants for green hydrogen, an alternative fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some heavy industries and long-distance transport.

A few years ago, green hydrogen looked set to become a key pillar of the global energy transition, with companies pitching visionary projects and governments rolling out strategies for the fuel to decarbonise economies. But inflated forecasts, high costs and weak demand have led to a reality check for prospective producers like Tüpraş.

The Turkish refiner significantly scaled back its green hydrogen plans last year. While it originally hoped to start producing the clean fuel in 2025, it now targets a first pilot project by 2030 with commercial large-scale production not expected before 2035. That’s primarily because the cost of electrolysers, the machines that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, has risen fourfold since its original projections, the company said.

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Tüpraş’s ambition to become Türkiye’s leading producer of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has also seen a partial rethink. The firm originally said it would convert by 2026 a unit in its sprawling oil refinery in the port city of Izmir into a plant that would produce SAF from waste cooking oil into “green” jet fuel.

But it is now planning to build a dedicated plant which is expected to be commissioned towards the end of 2028. That means its SAF output will be added to its existing fossil fuel refining capacity rather than replacing any of it.

A Tupras refinery in Turkiye. Photo: Tüpraş A Tupras refinery in Turkiye. Photo: Tüpraş

Dividends dwarf green spending

Under its updated blueprint, Tüpraş plans to invest $4.35 billion in zero-carbon power, SAF and green hydrogen by 2035. Last year, it spent $137 million on activities that qualify as green under EU rules, leaving much ground to make up in the next 10 years. Most of its green investment in 2025 went on solar and wind farms, and a quarter on a unit making propylene, a refinery by-product used to produce plastic packaging and bottle caps.

Over the same year, it paid out about five times as much – roughly $740 million – to shareholders, under a policy of distributing around 80% of its profits. About half went to Koç Holding, which in turn paid its own shareholders some $460 million. The Koç family and companies it controls hold the majority of the group.

Kelly Trout, research director at energy think-tank Oil Change International, said a company like Koç should not be the face of the COP31 climate summit as it doesn’t pass the test of “climate integrity” the UN requires of a sponsor.

The hosting agreement struck between Türkiye and the UNFCCC says that the government has to consult the secretariat of the UN body to obtain advice on which “entities of concern” it should not conclude sponsorship or partnership agreements with. The document adds that the advice should give appropriate consideration to the partner’s climate integrity, but it does not specify how that should be judged.

‘Climate integrity’ mystery

Climate Home News asked the UNFCCC and the Turkish COP31 presidency if this process was followed for the Koç Holding sponsorship, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

The same provision featured in the host country agreement for COP29 in Azerbaijan, according to a leaked copy published by Human Rights Watch.

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The clean energy arm of state-owned oil and gas company SOCAR was named “Energy Transition Partner” for that summit, alongside other firms which an investigation from the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) found were owned by the country’s ruling family or people associated with them.

Koç is not the first fossil fuel-linked company to bankroll a UN climate summit. At COP24 in the Polish coal-mining city of Katowice in 2018, sponsors included the state coal power company PGE and the coking coal miner JSW.

‘A real story to tell’

COP sponsors typically get the right to promote themselves inside the conference venue and appear at official events. When it unveiled the agreement, the COP31 presidency called Koç Holding a “vital partner” in its efforts to unite the public and the private sector “to demonstrate Türkiye’s unwavering commitment to global climate action”.

The presidency declined to answer Climate Home News’ questions on how Koç Holding will be involved in the summit.

Koç itself has revealed little about its plans for the Antalya talks. When the deal was announced, the group said it would use the summit to share its experience of turning climate solutions into “concrete business results” and to forge new partnerships.

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Speaking at a high-level roundtable on energy at UN headquarters in New York last month, Ali Koç said the industrial group has “a real story to tell”, having undertaken a “comprehensive transformation process in climate matters”.

Campaigners, however, want companies that retain their high-emitting businesses to be excluded from the COP climate summits and have long demanded an “accountability framework” to protect the negotiations from fossil fuel influence.

“If the UNFCCC and its secretariat wants to salvage a bit of credibility, the UNFCCC needs to urgently address conflicts of interest in the UN talks,” said Corporate Europe Observatory’s Sabido.

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