Kathmandu, November 6
Nearly 200 countries are set to gather in Turkey on Monday for the COP31 climate summit, but tensions over geopolitics, climate finance and fossil fuels are tempering expectations of a major breakthrough in the fight against climate change.
More than 100,000 people are expected to attend the UN’s two-week climate negotiations in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya.
Stronger action to phase out fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change, appears unlikely. Meanwhile, financially constrained developed countries are reluctant to commit additional funds to help developing nations cope with the impacts of climate change.
An energy crisis and rising cost-of-living pressures, fuelled by the war in the Middle East, are also casting a shadow over the gathering.
“This is not going to be the COP that changes the world,” said Paul Watkinson, France’s former chief negotiator at climate summits.
“It’s an intermediate COP in many ways. But it is an important conference and it does need to make sure it makes progress,” he said.
The talks come amid a series of climate-related disasters, including deadly floods in Nepal, intense heatwaves in Europe and major wildfires in Indonesia.
An exceptionally strong El Niño climate phenomenon is forecast to peak later this year, potentially intensifying extreme weather and contributing to 2026 or 2027 becoming the hottest year on record.
The outlook is increasingly concerning. In September, the United Nations warned that global temperatures were on course to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, crossing the most ambitious threshold set by the Paris Agreement.
An ‘implementation COP’
Turkey is hosting COP31, while Australia is leading the negotiations under an unusual arrangement that resolved a dispute over which country would host the conference.
“COP31 comes at a difficult time for the world,” said Australian Climate Minister Chris Bowen.
“Reaching consensus among nearly 200 countries will not be easy but cooperation remains essential,” he said.
COP31 President Murat Kurum, Turkey’s environment minister, said the conference would seek “to turn the commitments of past COPs into real results”.
Alongside the formal negotiations, Turkey is promoting an “action agenda” encouraging countries to make non-binding pledges on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to waste management.
The centrepiece of the initiative is an electrification drive aimed at increasing the share of global energy demand met by electricity from around 20 per cent currently to 35 per cent by 2035.
“This year’s energy crisis has shocked us out of our complacency,” Kurum said. “Electrification is the answer. It protects communities from volatile global markets and cuts emissions.”
Turkey and Australia also want electrification included in the summit’s “cover decision”, an overarching political statement negotiated by consensus that reflects the main outcomes of the conference.
The European Union has called for “clean” electrification, a qualification that could trigger debate over the role of fossil fuels in Turkey’s initiative.
“The Turkish COP31 presidency’s electrification pledge was quite carefully worded in its language,” said Cosima Cassel, a climate diplomacy expert at the think tank E3G.
“It is quite an open pledge that I think is going to enable quite a few countries to come on board,” Cassel said, noting that the initiative refers to “diverse and sustainable energy sources”.
Dispute over climate finance
At COP28 in 2023, countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in a landmark deal. However, they have struggled to reach consensus on how to turn that commitment into action.
COP30 ended with an agreement that made no explicit mention of fossil fuels after oil-producing countries opposed including such language. Instead, Brazil put forward a voluntary “roadmap” outlining proposals for phasing out fossil fuels, allowing individual countries to adapt them to their own circumstances.
Observers say Turkey and Australia are keen to avoid a repeat of last year’s dispute over fossil fuels at COP31.
However, tensions are expected over the failure of wealthy nations to fulfil their financial commitments to help developing countries adapt to climate change and transition to cleaner energy.
A group of African negotiators is demanding that a commitment to triple adaptation finance — funding to help countries deal with the worsening impacts of climate change — be included in the formal negotiation agenda.
Recent elections have given climate campaigners a boost, with Democrats taking control of the US Congress in a setback for President Donald Trump, who has dismissed global warming as a hoax.
A US congressional delegation will attend COP31, although the Trump administration will not participate in the negotiations.
Meanwhile, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, fresh from his re-election victory over conservative challenger Flavio Bolsonaro, is scheduled to travel to Antalya next week.
