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

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 hottest on record, according to a UN report released the same day.

“A drought in one part of the world is felt at the dinner table in another,” said Turkish president-designate Murat Kurum, while UN climate chief Simon Stiell said progress had been “nowhere near fast enough”.

“This year's fossil fuel cost chaos has delivered a global shockwave, hitting households hard and spreading inflation like a cancer,” said Stiell.

Kurum, who is also Turkey’s minister of environment, urbanisation and Climate Change, has explicitly positioned Antalya as an “Implementation Cop” built around electrification, waste reduction, climate finance and green industry. He set a voluntary global goal for 35 per cent of energy needs from electricity by 2035.

Yet critics have questioned the climate credentials of both Australia, a major coal exporter, and Turkey, a major coal consumer, as they seek to shift attention towards electrification and away from fossil fuels. Amid rising domestic emissions, Ankara has continued to invest in oil, coal and gas and has yet to produce a credible plan to phase them out

They have also pointed to major structural obstacles to Turkey’s electricity ambitions. It currently accounts for around 22 per cent of total final energy consumption, but the country is Europe's largest producer of coal-fired electricity, with just over a third coming from coal – the dirtiest of fossil fuels – and almost another quarter from gas.

The country has high coal dependence, according to Climate Watch, and it is the only member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that has not banned new coal plant permits.

It is also seeking to expand two coal-fired power stations: Afşin-Elbistan, which has operated for decades in one of the country's most polluted regions, and the smaller Cenal, near the western coastal town of Çanakkale.

The projects would allow the plants to burn considerably more coal, extending the country's reliance. Opponents have raised concern that they are also a serious public health risk.

More than a dozen residents living near the Afşin-Elbistan plant questioned Turkey’s commitment to Cop31, telling The Independent that they believe the plant is causing widespread sickness, including cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular problems.

The names of the people we spoke to have been changed to protect them – many others did not want to speak out for fear of reprisal as the plant is now the main employer in the area.

Dr Mehmet has worked at a hospital in the Elbistan area for 15 years and says that 70 per cent of the patients he sees suffer from respiratory problems, many are pregnant women or children. He believes it is the result of oxidative stress caused by breathing in toxic emissions.

The most common complaints he sees are a persistent cough, breathing problems, mucus, high blood pressure and heart palpitations. Although they are not rare conditions, he says it is the number of cases that make it unusual, the fact that they appear even in the young and that the problems appear to be site specific.

People develop problems after moving to the area, he claims, and the issues seem to clear up in those who move away. He also sees a lot of patients who have had asthma attacks and believes they take a longer time than normal to recover.

“Whatever comes out from those chimneys goes straight into your lungs and stays there for a long time until your body can’t take it anymore,” Dr Mehmet says. “We have a population of 140,000 people and it’s like they’re forcing everyone here to chainsmoke. It’s really a horrible place.”

The Afşin-Elbistan complex is made up of two power stations: the older A, which began operating in 1984, and B, which opened in 2006. A was ordered to close for failing to install legally required pollution-control equipment in 2020, but Kurum permitted two of its four units to reopen five months later.

An expansion of A to add two new further units, increasing capacity by 688MW – or enough to supply around 500,000 to 700,000 extra homes – was first proposed two years later. The local community has been fighting the plans ever since, saying the plant has impacted health, water supplies, farming and has seen thousands of people move out of the area.

A 2022 analysis commissioned by Greenpeace Mediterranean estimated that an extension could cause around 1,900 premature deaths, with a later Human Rights Watch report finding that despite early warning of an expected “cancer explosion” the government “has failed to monitor and reduce the harm.”

Despite the complaints, the expansion was approved in 2024. However, that was overturned by a court in July this year, the ruling highlighted that its potential impact on public health and the environment had not been properly assessed. Since then, however, the government and plant operator, Celikler Holding, have appealed the ruling.

They have continued to pursue expansion even as Turkey hosts Cop31 a few hours drive away.

Duygu Kutluay, a campaigner with Beyond Fossil Fuels, says there is a "fundamental contradiction” between Turkey promoting electrification as a global priority ahead of the summit while continuing to support coal expansion at home.

“At Afşin-Elbistan, the debate is not simply about energy policy, it is also about public health, environmental protection and the people living with the consequences,” Kutluay says. “As Cop31 host, Turkey has an opportunity to show that climate leadership means committing to no new coal, accelerating renewables and ensuring a fair transition for workers and communities.”

She added that the country’s climate ambitions “risk being undermined” by domestic energy choices.

Turkey's coal expansion also extends beyond Afşin-Elbistan. In Adana, plans would increase coal mining by almost half, while a proposed expansion at the Cenal plant in Çanakkale would increase its generating capacity by almost 80 per cent.

Coal mining continues in Zonguldak, despite a long history of deadly accidents. Last month, a methane explosion at a private coal mine in Gelik killed three miners and injured five.

It is hard to definitively prove a connection between the plant and the health problems locals report because access to information is opaque and restricted in an increasingly authoritarian country. No official health study has been commissioned, and if it was, it could take years for the results.

Ahead of the Antalya summit, rights groups have also accused the government of arbitrarily arresting and prosecuting activists who speak up about climate issues and those involved in environmental protests.

Yet according to data from the government’s own air pollution monitoring system, coupled with satellite data, there are “dangerously high levels of air pollution in the area surrounding the plant,” says Deniz Bayram, assistant researcher for Europe and Central Asia at HRW.

In 2023, Elbistan was the epicentre of one of two devastating earthquakes that struck nine hours apart and killed more than 50,000 people. Damage to the power stations forced them to shut down for much of the year, she says, and air pollution levels in the area fell sharply.

“Plant A operated for decades without the necessary technology to reduce harmful emissions,” Bayram says, calling the government’s appeal over the expansion “disappointing”.

“Credible research in the field shows that Turkey could commit to exit from coal by 2030 while keeping its existing development indicators,” says Bayram, adding that the country should “not miss the opportunity to send an important message to the world” while hosting Cop31.

According to Mehmet Dalkanat, 71, who is a member of a local ecological campaign group, the problems caused by Plant A stretch way beyond health. Before it was built, intensive agriculture flourished in the area – the soil was exceptionally fertile, yielding wheat, barley, chickpeas, beans and lentils.

Now more than a thousand huge pumps draw groundwater out of the earth to dry up coal deposits so they can be mined. Dalkanat says it has parched natural springs and turned the land arid.

“People also left and this once rich town of 11,000 has dwindled to barely 300 or 500 residents now – mostly of them impoverished or elderly, or those with nowhere else to go,” he says, outside an abandoned municipal administration building in Çoğulhan. The settlement sits at the foot of the plant, and suffers the worst of the pollution.

Once a busy town hall, grass has now grown across through the concrete courtyard of and broken glass from smashed windows crunches underfoot. Homes all over the area lay derelict, with whole rows of shops shuttered and empty.

“It looks like a ghost town now from an American Western movie, while you can’t find a single person untouched by illness,” Dalkanat says.

For Cuma, a construction worker in his forties, the fact that Turkey’s rhetoric ahead of Cop31 is hypocritical. His son suffered from leukemia as a small child, which he believes was caused by breathing emissions from the plant.

Cuma says medical tests found no genetic cause for the cancer, and that an unusual number of children in the area were also diagnosed with a disease.

Air pollution from coal-fired power stations contains toxic substances, including carcinogens such as benzene, which has been linked to leukaemia. The cancer usually affects just under five in every 100,000 children annually.

While his son survived and has made a full recovery, Cuma claims two other children in this small settlement died of leukemia at around the same time.

“This country is talking a lot, but it doesn’t actually do anything,” says Cuma, eating freshly-cooked warm bread rolls prepared by his wife. “Talking is easy. You saw what’s going on here – everyone knows this plant is killing us and that we don’t want it here. Now let’s act.”

Celikler Holdings and the ministries of Energy and Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change did not respond to requests for comment.