Two Addresses, One Gavel, and No One to Pay

A Summit That Answers to Two Capitals

COP31 is a name built for a single address: one city, one host government, one gavel, one final text. The name conceals a compromise. The negotiations are chaired by Australia, while the meeting itself takes place in the Turkish city of Antalya — the venue whose Expo centre delegates were walking past as the summit opened. That split is the residue of an angry row over who should host, resolved only by handing one country the talks and the other the venue. Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made hosting a COP a key pledge back in 2021, while in opposition and before his successful election campaign. Arcane rules meant his country had to wait its turn to bid, and it was then embroiled in the standoff with Turkey. The bitter taste lingers. To some participants Australia has looked like a rather half-hearted host: its media has been much quieter on COP than in previous host countries, and although Albanese is due to speak at the opening of the leaders’ segment, he is unlikely to stay long. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, showed little interest in climate and environmental concerns before bidding to host this year’s summit. The name also hides the question that has trailed these talks through every hotter year — whether they matter at all. What is formally at stake in Antalya is the implementation of promises already made: above all the commitment to move away from fossil fuels, plus the money promised to poorer countries and a Turkish plan to shift more of the world’s energy use onto electricity. The talks have been running for decades, and the planet has grown hotter throughout them.

The minister in daily charge of the negotiations is Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate and energy minister. His portfolio reveals the trap. Because aspects of Australia’s energy supply also fall under his remit, he has spent much of his tenure in the sometimes uncomfortable position of having to boost fossil fuels while insisting on the need for a clean energy transition. Australia remains one of the world’s major fossil fuel exporters. It has also invested heavily in renewables, and solar power has expanded so far that consumers are sometimes offered free electricity. A large exporter of the fuels the summit is meant to phase down can still host a credible negotiation, but only if it is willing to say both halves of the sentence out loud. That is now Bowen’s job from the chair. Whether a chair can carry that contradiction is one of the things Antalya will answer.

Turkey’s contribution to the substance runs through Murat Kurum, the environment minister, whose government controls the action agenda — a programme of voluntary initiatives rather than binding commitments. Erdoğan has used that platform to advance an interest of his wife, Emine Erdoğan, in cutting waste and promoting the circular economy. She has called for an end to “throwaway culture” and for recycling instead of landfill. The domestic record sits awkwardly beside the message: Turkey still has sites that leak vast quantities of methane. The word “voluntary” is doing a great deal of work here. The regional arithmetic adds to the picture. In the last five years the summit has been held in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, all in the same broad region. That run has given an outsize role to the Arab group of countries, neighbours with a strong interest in ensuring that fossil fuel interests — including their lobbyists — are well represented. Lobbyists were granted access at COP29.

Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency and one of the world’s leading energy economists, is understood to be one of the advisers behind the emphasis: displacing fossil fuels with electricity for heating, transport and industrial uses. The arithmetic explains why the idea travels. Electrification could halve the amount of energy the world needs, and it is the next biggest step, after boosting renewable energy generation, towards a low-carbon world. The backdrop is arithmetic of a worse kind. Eleven years ago the world was on track for 4C of warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. In 2015 nations set the goal of keeping warming below 2C, with a preferred limit of 1.5C, measured over a multi-year period. The world now sits at 1.4C and is hurtling towards 2.6C, by the UN’s own finding. Two months before the summit the UN readjusted its decade-old 1.5C goal, because the world is blowing past that threshold. The fallout is already visible in Europe’s deadly summer heat waves and in Nepal’s devastating flooding. October 2026 was the hottest October on record.

The Chairs That Will Stay Empty

The largest chair in the room will be empty. No US delegation is expected at COP31, and Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the country from the UN framework convention on climate change will soon mean none can take part at all. The absence is not a scheduling matter. Trump has spent his second term dismantling the US renewable energy sector and boosting fossil fuels, setting the country on course to start increasing greenhouse gas emissions again after decades in which they fell. The US is the world’s largest historic carbon polluter, and it skipped last year’s summit in Belém, where Trump’s shadow was already felt as the rollback began. His attention this year has been fixed on the midterm elections, a verdict on his second term that has shown Republicans the electoral dangers of an unpredictable White House. His administration’s unpopularity with the electorate, combined with a drought and fire-filled summer, has bolstered the pro-climate stance of scores of Democratic congresspeople and state governors, despite a campaign of “climate hushing” before the midterms. Some of them, and a scattering of business leaders, may attend COP31. The result is an unusual geometry: a delegation that will not exist, and a cohort of American politicians who may turn up anyway without a federal mandate to negotiate.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, will not come either, but his country’s energy and industrial transformation will do more to set the planet’s course than any speech delivered in Antalya. China is the world’s second biggest economy and its biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, making up nearly a third of global annual carbon output — a share owed mainly to the fossil fuels that powered 25 years of explosive economic growth. It has also invested in renewable energy on a scale that is reshaping the global energy business. The officials Xi sends will arrive knowing that petrostates including Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are his important allies, and that countries pushing for a low-carbon future may be more important still, because they are China’s customers. Those two ledgers do not cancel each other out. The world is not choosing between fossil fuels and renewables; it is using both to meet demand from power-hungry artificial intelligence and ever-growing economic development. That combination is not helping to curb climate change.

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, spent several months this year mulling an intriguing proposition: hosting COP33, the 2028 summit. In April India withdrew its bid without specifying why, leaving the field open. The withdrawal is a window on the dilemma underneath. India is torn between a burgeoning clean energy sector — it now has the world’s third biggest installed capacity of renewable energy, after China and the US — and a coal sector that still supplies about 70% of its electricity and has close links to Modi. Its delegations are led by the environment minister, Bhupender Yadav, who enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the UK’s Ed Miliband and a reputation as a forward thinker. A country that might have hosted the great accounting of 2028 has decided, for now, not to seek it.

Two Addresses, One Gavel, and No One to Pay (Image 1)

Saudi Arabia has a long history of obstructing the UN climate negotiations, though its behaviour was sometimes muted when the US intervened. With Trump in the White House, Saudi Arabia has felt emboldened to interfere further, with allies including Russia, Venezuela, members of the Arab group and the Like-Minded Developing Countries grouping. At COP30 its delegation refused to allow even an oblique mention of the pledge to “transition away from fossil fuels” — made at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 — into the final text until the final moments. That pattern matters because the text is the one product these talks reliably deliver. What survives the last hours becomes the benchmark against which the next round is measured, and a phrase removed in Antalya is a phrase that governments no longer have to answer for at home.

The Bill, the Signature, and the Delay

A pledge to pay is not a payment. Niklas Höhne, co-founder of Germany’s NewClimate Institute, splits the difficulty in two. “There’s always two topics in the climate negotiations that are relevant and difficult,” he said. [1] “The first one is who produces emissions (and) how much. That is difficult enough. But what is even more complicated is the other issue, and that is who pays. And on this one, we are particularly in a difficult situation because the U.S., as the largest contributor, has dropped out. And there’s no other player who can jump in.” Negotiators in Antalya will also hash out how to provide the promised funds to poor countries to switch to renewables, adapt to a warmer world and recover from climate-induced damage. David Waskow, international climate chief at the World Resources Institute, described the fortnight as the point where the wider picture comes into focus: “It’s really the moment that we place a magnifying lens on what’s happening in the world on climate change, both good and bad.” [1] Brazil’s recently re-elected president, Lula da Silva, makes his first trip abroad since winning a historic fourth term, and he brings two roadmaps: one a global plan for the transition away from fossil fuels, the other for halting and reversing deforestation. They are non-binding, they contain no deadlines and they impose no firm requirements on governments; what they offer is a series of steps that governments can take. The European Union illustrates the opposite direction of travel. Far-right populists are on the rise across the bloc, pushing climate denialism, and the EU has backed down from some key regulations — watering down its green deal package, loosening the strings on corporate climate liabilities, delaying rules on trade in goods from deforested areas and extending the phase-in of new car rules. Europe’s car industry failed to move decisively to electric vehicles, preferring to lobby against emissions standards, a strategy that has turned out badly as consumers move in droves to cheap-to-run EVs, and the result is now a threat to slap tariffs on Chinese cars, with EU negotiators heading to China hoping to curb cheap imports of hybrid electric cars. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, called this summer’s record-breaking heatwaves and drought a “summer of truth” that must be answered, and she is confirmed for the summit. [1] Wopke Hoekstra, the Dutch climate commissioner, will oversee the final stages of the talks for the EU and is expected to make competition with China a key focus.

Britain arrives with a prime minister attending his first COP and a foreign secretary who has attended many. Andy Burnham’s record on the climate since taking office is mixed. During the record-breaking heatwaves and droughts of this summer he was criticised for failing to speak out on the climate crisis; he then made strong interventions affirming his support for the UK’s target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and then backed the Jackdaw gasfield. No decision has been announced on the Rosebank oilfield. From December, though, he will have a much bigger platform: the UK takes over the revolving presidency of the G20, the group of the world’s biggest developed and developing economies, and is expected to emphasise building resilience against the impacts of the climate crisis as a key focus of its year-long term. Ed Miliband, now foreign secretary and a veteran of many COPs in government and opposition, is expected to accompany him to the leaders’ segment; he was hailed publicly and privately by many participants last year for patient bridge-building that helped Brazil rescue a deal from the fractious final hours of COP30. At this year’s UN general assembly he also briefed other governments on the findings of the UK’s joint intelligence committee, which warned that the impact of collapsing ecosystems around the world posed a national security risk, threatening food shortages, mass migration and potential nuclear war. The energy and net zero secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, will head the UK delegation for the final negotiations in the last days, after the leaders have departed.

COP31 will be the final outing at a UN climate summit for António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who has regularly intervened powerfully on this subject. His successor has still not been chosen, and The US has tried to get Viktor Orbán, the far-right former prime minister of Hungary, into the role, or Lana Nusseibeh, a former minister from the United Arab Emirates. Simon Stiell, the determined executive secretary of the UNFCCC, will oversee the talks, with an added twist to the job this year: he has to liaise between the two co-hosts as well as between the fractious parties. The quietest fight of the year concerns a document rather than a delegation. At recent meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Saudi Arabia led a small group of countries — including China, India, Russia and Kenya — that fought to delay publication of the next comprehensive assessment of climate science. That report, expected to warn of catastrophic impacts from further temperature rises, was due in 2028, in time for COP33, where countries assess their own progress on meeting emissions-cutting goals under the Paris agreement, a process known as the global stocktake. Delaying it by a year or more, as Saudi Arabia wants, would drain urgency from that accounting and could help governments get away with inadequate measures on decarbonisation. So the summit opens in Antalya with a chair shared by two capitals, a bill with no largest payer, and a scientific report that may arrive after the deadline it was meant to inform.

Sources

Guardian — Quote source (original article)

Two Addresses, One Gavel, and No One to Pay (Image 2)