First lady Emine Erdoğan called for curbing excessive consumption and waste at the opening of New York Climate Week on Sept. 21, saying climate action required changes in everyday habits.
Erdoğan, who chairs the U.N. High-Level Advisory Board on Zero Waste, acknowledged the role of fossil fuels and industrial emissions in climate change while questioning the unrestricted demand driving production.
She criticized a system that treats products as short-lived and destined for disposal, citing estimates that 7 billion tons of the roughly 9.2 billion tons of plastic produced worldwide since the 1950s had become waste.
The environmental costs of high consumption often fell on societies consuming the least, vulnerable regions and future generations, she said.
Reducing waste therefore required changes in both habits and systems.
As long as people continued the habits causing today’s problems, “no target will be sufficient on its own, and no technology will be a solution on its own,” she said.
Erdoğan said Türkiye wanted the Zero Waste approach to feature prominently in climate action at COP31, which the country will host in November.
She said the gathering’s value would depend on what participants did differently after leaving.
The Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Ministry and the Zero Waste Foundation were among the opening event’s main sponsors.
Erdoğan also held separate meetings with Sierra Leone’s first lady Fatima Maada Bio and Brazil’s first lady Rosangela Lula da Silva. She said her talks with da Silva covered environmental issues, the climate crisis and preparations for COP31.
