In less than a month, thousands of delegates from almost every country will gather at the Antalya Expo Center in Türkiye. The 31st UN Climate Change Conference, or COP31, will take place from 9 to 20 November 2026. Türkiye will host the conference and lead the action agenda, while Australia will lead the negotiations. Heads of state are scheduled to meet on 11 and 12 November.
Indonesia has already packed its bags. The President’s Special Envoy for Climate and Energy, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, will lead the delegation under the theme “Delivering Climate Solutions at Scale.” The government will establish a carbon market and rehabilitate 12.3 million hectares of forest to attract international support. The Indonesia Pavilion will serve as a meeting place for buyers and sellers of carbon credits. The Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) says the aim is to make projects investment-ready. Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs Zulkifli Hasan wants Indonesia’s carbon market to be credible, transparent, and trusted worldwide.
I read the news while pulling Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime off the shelf again. Latour first published the book in French in 2017; Polity Press published its English translation in 2018. One question from the book has stayed with me: Where are we going to land? After reading about our delegation’s plans, the question took on a different shape. Is Indonesia going to Antalya to land on Earth—or to sell it?
Latour opens his book with a climate conference. He describes the closing of COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015 as one of the most important and least discussed historical events. For Latour, its significance lay neither in the agreement’s content nor in whether countries would implement it. It lay in a realization that dawned on the people in the room. The delegates applauded, then anxiously realized that if every country pursued its own development plans, there would not be enough of the planet to accommodate them all. They needed several planets. They had only one.
Ten years have passed since Paris, yet that realization does not seem to have changed behavior. In November 2025 in Belém, Brazil, COP30 ended without a roadmap to move away from fossil fuels in its formal decisions. More than 80 countries supported the call for such a roadmap. But the COP30 President could only promise to develop one outside the official text. This year, the host of COP31 itself faces criticism from Greenpeace over coal subsidies. Civil society groups have also protested plans to expand coal-fired power plants in Türkiye.
Latour offers an unsettling explanation for this pattern. He advances a hypothesis that he himself calls a political fiction. Since the 1980s, the world has seen deregulation, widening inequality, and the denial of climate change. Latour sees these three developments as symptoms of the same condition. Some of the world’s elites already know that Earth cannot accommodate everyone’s development dreams. They have not chosen to change course. They have chosen to save themselves. Latour uses the image of the Titanic: upper-class passengers know the ship is sinking, so they reserve lifeboats for themselves and tell the orchestra to keep playing. He also points to a real example. In the early 1990s, ExxonMobil had already published research on the dangers of climate change, yet it continued to ramp up drilling and fund campaigns denying the threat.
I do not want to describe every climate conference as an orchestra playing on the Titanic. These conferences remain the only table where small countries such as Tuvalu can speak directly to powerful nations. Still, I worry that the music is getting louder as the ship tilts further to one side.
My greatest concern, however, is how our delegation views forests. Latour distinguishes between two ways of seeing nature. The first is what he calls the Galilean view: nature as an inert object that can be measured from a distance and used as a resource. Latour calls it the view from Sirius, a distant star—as if we could understand Earth by standing outside it. The second, which he associates with James Lovelock, sees nature as a collection of agents that help shape the conditions for life and respond when pressure is applied. Economists may regard nature as a factor of production, Latour writes, but that idea would never occur to someone who had read Lovelock.
The carbon market is the view from Sirius in its purest form. Forests are converted into tonnes of carbon, calculated using satellite imagery. Those numbers then change hands in the Antalya Pavilion between sellers and buyers who may never set foot on the land where the forests grow. I do not oppose efforts to reduce emissions. I am simply asking the question Latour teaches us to ask: who lives inside those numbers?
In the third chapter, Latour writes that the experience of losing one’s land has long been part of colonized peoples’ experience. For four centuries, they endured conquest, colonialism, and then development. Now, wealthy nations are beginning to feel the ground beneath their feet shake because of the climate crisis. Latour imagines the formerly colonized responding with irony: welcome to our club.
Farmers in Malin Deman, Mukomuko Regency, have long been members of that club. They used to grow jengkol, rice, and coffee. In 1995, a company obtained cultivation rights (HGU) over around 1,889 hectares there, then abandoned the land two years later. Local residents returned to farm it. In 2004, another company arrived and planted oil palm. In May 2022, authorities arrested around 40 farmers who were harvesting crops on the disputed land. Latour writes that people who lose their land feel the same thing everywhere: a force from elsewhere arrives and takes their land, leaving them with no control. The carbon market risks becoming the next force from elsewhere.
The figure of 12.3 million hectares reminds me of the Rejang people in Lebong. Part of their customary territory lies within Kerinci Seblat National Park. For years, the state labeled people who cultivated their ancestral land as encroachers. They have been fighting since the 1990s, and it was only on 6 June 2026 that the Minister of Forestry handed over customary-forest decrees to six Rejang communities in Lebong. How much of the 12.3 million hectares the government plans to offer in Antalya lies within unrecognized customary territories? Who will receive the money generated by carbon in those forests? Reports on our delegation’s preparations have barely mentioned Indigenous Peoples.
Latour wrote a sentence I want to pass on to our delegation: what is illegitimate is uprooting people, not their being rooted. For decades, our policies have treated people’s ties to their land as an obstacle to progress. Forest rehabilitation carried out without them will repeat the same mistake, only in greener language.
Indonesia’s delegation will also introduce the Renewable Energy Bill in Antalya. Meanwhile, in Bungin and Talang Liak villages, in Bingin Kuning Subdistrict, Lebong Regency, three farmers are facing a renewable energy company in court. In April 2016 and February 2018, flash floods and landslides from the upper reaches of PT Pertamina Geothermal Energy Hululais’s working area flowed into the Air Kotok and Air Karat rivers. Mud and rocks buried the rice fields belonging to David Narton, Nur Ali, and Rafiul Hatta. The three sued the company at the Tubei District Court. The company filed a countersuit for Rp22 billion and sought a court order to attach their rice fields as security.
For Latour, the Air Kotok and Air Karat rivers are agents. They react to what happens upstream. This case reveals the trap we will carry to Antalya. As long as we continue to view the world through the lens of a production system, even clean energy can take away rice fields. We change the fuel, but our treatment of the Earth and its people remains the same. Ironically, COP31 will also discuss mechanisms for a just transition. The farmers in Bingin Kuning could tell negotiators what an unjust transition feels like.
Latour also introduces the term “Critical Zone.” Scientists use it to describe the thin layer, several kilometers deep, between bedrock and the atmosphere where all life takes place. In this layer, Latour says, science is never neutral. No company funds campaigns to deny the discovery of the Higgs boson. But when it comes to land, water, forests, and the climate, every study immediately becomes a battleground for competing interests. The carbon market is part of that battleground, too. Who measures the carbon, using whose methods, and for whose benefit? Farmers’ knowledge of their rivers and forests often loses out to studies paid for by project owners.
Chapter 19 of Latour’s book is the section I most want to read aloud at the Indonesia Pavilion. Latour answers the question that is bound to arise: so what should we do? Start by describing the place where we live, he says. What do we need to survive? Who depends on us? Whom must we fight against? Latour insists that we must not skip the stage of description. In his view, no political lie is more brazen than immediately offering a program before doing that work.
Our delegation’s theme is solutions at scale. Latour, by contrast, urges us to start from the ground up, centimeter by centimeter, creature by creature, person by person. He draws an example from France. Between January and May 1789, the king asked his subjects to write down their grievances. Within months, villages and towns across France produced registers of grievances detailing the plots of land, taxes, and privileges that burdened their lives. People who had been considered ignorant proved capable of describing the conflicts in their own localities.
Fishers in Linau Village, Maje Subdistrict, and Merpas Village, Nasal Subdistrict, in Kaur Regency, are doing what Latour asks. Through the Perahu Dayung Maje and Ujung Lancang joint business groups (KUB), they are mapping their own octopus fishing grounds. Fishers in Linau identified 12 sites, while those in Merpas identified more than a dozen others. They dive alongside a team of divers to monitor octopus habitats, and have begun recording their catches as village-level data. The government will bring the subject of blue carbon in coastal areas to Antalya. I want to know whether the octopus maps from Linau and Merpas will also be included in the delegation’s suitcase.
Latour also laments the tendency of social movements and environmental movements to operate separately. We are not choosing between workers’ wages and the fate of small birds, he writes. We are choosing between two kinds of world, both of which contain workers and birds, but connect them in different ways. He calls the 21st century an era of geo-social problems. Climate conferences often separate the two. Negotiating rooms discuss tonnes of emissions and trillions of dollars in financing. The five farmers who were shot during a conflict with an oil palm company in Pino Raya, South Bengkulu, in November 2025 do not appear in those calculations. Yet they were defending the very place the conference seeks to save.
One small piece of news troubles me. According to reports on COP31 preparations, the UNFCCC secretariat said that admitting new observer organizations could take more than a year because of limited resources. This means many community groups seeking to attend for the first time this year may not be able to participate as observers. The conference doors remain wide open for carbon buyers and sellers, while they are narrowing for the people who live in forests and along coastlines.
I do not accept Latour uncritically. He writes from France for a European audience, and closes his book by defending Europe as the place where he wants to land. For readers from formerly colonized countries, that chapter feels awkward. His four-pole map is also too neat for the realities of village life. Latour died in October 2022. Yet his questions remain incisive, and Antalya is the right place to ask them again.
I therefore have four requests for Indonesia’s delegation. First, do not sell carbon from forests where land rights remain unclear. Recognize customary territories and community-managed land first, then discuss carbon. Second, make the free, prior, and informed consent of local communities an absolute requirement for every carbon and energy project. Third, protect people defending their environment from criminalization and retaliatory lawsuits. Article 66 of Law No. 32 of 2009 and Supreme Court Regulation No. 1 of 2023 are already in place, and the farmers in Bingin Kuning are putting both to the test. Fourth, return from Antalya determined to complete the Indigenous Peoples Bill, which has been stalled in the House of Representatives for years.
Latour does not give us an address for where to land. He only points us in a direction. We cannot return to a closed-off homeland. Nor can we keep pursuing growth that the planet cannot contain, even when that growth is now painted green. We must land on real ground, with rivers, mud, octopuses, and people who depend on it.
Farmers, fishers, and Indigenous Peoples in Bengkulu have long been standing on that ground. They have never left the Earth. Those who need to land are the negotiators, carbon buyers, permit issuers, and all of us who have spent too long discussing the climate from on high. Antalya is about 8,600 kilometers from Bengkulu. I hope our delegation does not travel all that way merely to look at Earth from Sirius.
Erwin Basrin is active with Akar Global Inisiatif in Bengkulu.