A Postcard Setting for a Procedural Grind
Antalya, the Turkish beachside city better known for sunburned tourists than for treaty language, becomes the climate capital of the world for two weeks starting on 9 November. Tens of thousands of delegates arrive for COP31, the latest instalment of the annual UN climate summits. The setting is a postcard. The agenda is a stack of unfinished paperwork, and that mismatch is the story of this meeting.
The summits earned their reputation the hard way. In 2015 they produced the Paris Agreement, the treaty under which nations promised to hold warming to “well below” 2 °C and as close to 1.5 °C as possible. That was the peak. Since then the record has thinned. Critics argue the meetings are no longer fit for purpose, hobbled by the requirement that every decision be unanimous and left without a clear direction now that the work of agreeing a legal climate treaty is done. A machine built to draft a contract keeps running after the contract is signed, and nobody has rewritten its job description.
Last year’s COP30 in Belém, Brazil, showed what that looks like in practice. After a fortnight of tortuous negotiations, delegates agreed the bare minimum: that they remain united behind the Paris Agreement. They could not agree on fresh commitments to move away from fossil fuel use or to end deforestation. The world is now on course for lower warming than looked likely before Paris was struck, yet global emissions are still not falling. The projected track is 2.8 °C by the end of the century — nowhere near the goals laid out under Paris.
This year’s weather supplies the motivation the agenda lacks. Devastating glacier collapses, severe heatwaves and raging wildfires have provided no shortage of reminders that the planet is teetering on the brink of crisis. All of it arrived ahead of a super-sized El Niño now under way in the Pacific — a timely demonstration of what warming beyond 1.5 °C feels like in the real world. Hot and dangerous, in short.
Hangover Decisions and a Missing Road Map
The hosts, a joint gig between Turkey and Australia, have set a business-as-usual tone. As with recent summits, no big declaration and no new treaty are pegged to the meeting. The main task is to clear a series of hangover decisions from Belém, and a hangover, by definition, is the bill for the night before.
Three of those decisions stand out. First, countries agreed at COP30 to create a “just transition mechanism” — a support structure for workers and communities affected by the shift to clean energy — described variously as a platform, a hub and a work programme. The idea is to build a support structure for people affected by the shift to a cleaner economy, for instance working out how best to support and retrain workers in the fossil fuel economy as energy grids move to cleaner fuels. The process of identifying how this mechanism will actually work has barely begun. Second, nations agreed to triple adaptation finance, money to help countries cope with climate impacts, for lower-income countries by 2035. The commitment was vague: no baseline year, no agreement on who should contribute, no definition of which types of finance count. Delegates in Antalya will keep hammering out the details. Third, and largest, is the fossil fuel road map that COP30 failed to deliver.
That road map idea would have asked countries to draw up plans for moving their economies away from oil, gas and coal. More than 80 nations backed it in Brazil. The final text from the summit did not mention fossil fuels at all. Countries that still supported the idea gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April this year and jointly promised to draw up transition plans. To date, only France has produced anything like a fully fledged road map away from fossil fuels. Some countries are expected to announce theirs on the sidelines of COP31, but it is unclear whether any major fossil fuel economy will step forward. A global oil crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz makes the case for clean energy more obvious than ever, and even so, the road map idea is unlikely to reach the formal COP agenda this year. A pledge that 80 nations wanted and none could enforce is a strange kind of consensus: loud in the room, absent from the page. “These are all big, kind of chunky areas where you know there will be strong expectation from developing countries and civil society that there is progress made,” says Gareth Redmond-King at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK climate and energy think tank. [1] Chunky is the right word. These are not technical footnotes. They are the load-bearing walls of the transition, and the summit has scheduled itself to discuss the mortar.
Electrification, Empty Coffers and Two Chefs
Instead of a road map, the hosts are pushing electrification as the route away from fossil fuels. The logic: the more you electrify cars, home heating and the like, the faster the clean transition. Turkey has launched a new electrification target that would see countries commit to electrifying 35 per cent of their annual energy consumption by 2035, up from about 23 per cent today. Twelve points of energy consumption in nine years: a target that reads like a thermostat setting but functions as an industrial policy.
The details are unresolved. It is not yet known whether this would be a voluntary pledge countries sign up to or something the hosts push for universal agreement under the main negotiations. Nor is it clear whether the target would include any directive for countries to decarbonise their power grids. Turkey and Australia “are talking about electrification in isolation, [and] rarely talking about electrification linked to ramping up renewables and decarbonising”, says Redmond-King. [1] Plugging in more devices is not the same as cleaning the socket they draw from, and the distinction matters more than the headline number.
Money is the second headwind. Facing rising fuel prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran conflict, wealthy nations are tightening their belts. International aid has been cut significantly from many national budgets, including the UK’s, where spending is set to fall by £6.5 billion to a historical low in 2027/2028. Less money for climate action in lower-income countries means those countries say they cannot act to cut emissions without more cash. Arguments over funding risk souring the atmosphere of the summit before the negotiations even settle in.
The third headwind is the hosting arrangement itself. Turkey and Australia both wanted to host COP31 and neither would back down, so the UN awarded them joint responsibility. Turkey handles location and logistics plus the so-called Action Agenda, the pledges and announcements outside formal negotiations. Australia runs the formal talks. Running a successful COP is a major challenge even for one country; with two in charge, there is a real risk of drift into confusion and infighting. Questions over their commitment linger, since both have been slow to embrace the energy transition and still rely heavily on fossil fuels. Two chefs, one kitchen, and a menu that neither wrote alone.
There are spots of hope. Lula’s victory means Brazil’s delegation will be in Turkey pushing for more progress on deforestation and on fossil fuel transition road maps. Separately, Democrats may take control of the US Congress in midterm elections on 3 November, just before COP31 kicks off. A win in both houses could lead to renewed incentives for clean energy development and electric vehicles. The US withdrew from both the Paris Agreement and the UN climate convention after Donald Trump took office in 2025, a move that has substantially worsened warming projections for 2100. Any sense that the US is returning to climate action would bolster morale among delegates, morale being the one resource no national budget has managed to cut.
In the formal track, further talks will address how the different “implementation” programmes on cutting emissions and ensuring a fair transition work in practice. These are unlikely to produce big headlines. “What we are going to see… in Antalya are many very important discussions, but they are less grand, big decisions,” Ana Toni, executive director of COP30, told journalists on a briefing call on 22 October. [1] A cover decision, a summary text at a COP that can carry new pledges, offers the one opening for a headline-grabbing commitment. Australia and Turkey have said ahead of the summit that they will work on developing a cover text, which could acknowledge the inevitability that the world will overshoot 1.5 °C of warming and call on countries to go faster on cutting emissions. Wording fights over cover decisions often provide the dramatic finale of a COP. They can also become a trap for the ministers running the event, says Paul Watkinson, a highly experienced climate negotiator who has led both the French and European Union delegations at COPs. Ministerial teams arrive thinking, “how do I get a result that doesn’t look dreadful?” says Watkinson. “Particularly the ministers in charge; they want to get a boost to their career, and the country wants to say it’s done something important for the world.” The result, he says, is that COPs often end up “focused on yet another decision where we change the adverb.” One verb, polished until the room agrees it shines.
Watkinson wants the summits to focus far less on headlines generated by cover texts and far more on the backroom work of getting countries to collaborate and communicate. “If we seek the big decision each year, we’re using a huge amount of energy to get it, and we’re not focusing on the real challenge, which is how do we overcome the barriers that are holding us back,” he says. That might mean changing the process to rely less on a consensus outcome among all parties, with action instead delivered by smaller groups of willing participants who concentrate on delivering emissions cuts. Fewer signatures, more shovels.
It looks likely that Antalya, despite its postcard-worthy setting, will be an unglamourous mix of long nights and bitter quarrels, reluctant compromises and underwhelming outcomes. For meeting insiders, the hope is that change arrives in time for COP33 in two years, when countries are due to conclude a global assessment of their progress to decarbonisation. The pressure on that summit to deliver a meaningful response to the stocktake’s findings will be even greater. The question is whether these summits can reinvent themselves in time. As Watkinson puts it: “Practically everybody I speak to says, of course, we need to change it. We can’t carry on as we do.”