COP31 Antalya: Climate Talks Face the Finance Test

Representatives of more than 190 countries gather in Antalya, Türkiye, from 9 to 20 November for COP31 Antalya, the annual United Nations climate conference. The summit opens with scientists warning that the world is on course to pass the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C warming limit within the next few years, and with a powerful El Niño expected to intensify floods, droughts and heatwaves in the months ahead. According to the United Nations, the talks will centre on climate finance, adaptation and whether governments can turn a decade of pledges into delivery.

COP stands for Conference of the Parties, the countries signed up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The gatherings produced the Paris Agreement in 2015, when governments committed to keeping global warming well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it further. This year Türkiye hosts the summit and holds the presidency, while Australia leads the negotiations and works closely with Pacific Island countries, whose communities already face rising seas. The host country has put implementation at the top of the agenda, with initiatives on clean energy, food security, resilient cities, greener industries, oceans and waste reduction.

What is on the table in Antalya

Climate finance leads the agenda. Developing countries want wealthier nations to meet the climate finance commitments made under the Paris Agreement, while disagreements continue over who pays, how the money is accessed and how global financial flows can be steered toward climate action. Negotiators must also settle how a just transition mechanism agreed last year will work in practice, so the shift to cleaner economies does not leave workers and communities behind. Adaptation is another priority, with developing countries pressing for more support and for a way to measure progress. Governments also remain divided over how to strengthen emissions action and deliver on the climate plans they have already filed.

The summit will also launch the second global stocktake, the Paris Agreement's formal process for assessing collective progress toward its long-term goals. Selwin Hart, the UN Special Adviser on Climate Action and Just Transition, told UN News that the conference should be judged on more than its final negotiated text. He pointed to the action agenda, where governments, development banks, businesses and civil society work on practical solutions, and to the national commitments countries announce during the event. "There's sometimes this expectation that COPs will always have this big grand deal that will solve the climate crisis. That's not realistic," Hart said in the interview.

The science behind the summit

UN reports published in the run-up to the summit set a stark backdrop. The UN Environment Programme's 2026 Emissions Gap Report, titled "The Point of Return", found that current policies put the world on course for about 2.8°C of warming by 2100. Full implementation of countries' national climate plans would bring that figure down further, and adding their long-term net-zero promises would bring it to about 2.1°C. The report concluded that holding warming to the Paris limit with little or no overshoot is no longer achievable.

Instead, the report set out a pathway in which warming peaks between 1.7°C and 1.8°C around mid-century before returning to that level by 2100, with about a 50 per cent chance of success. Reaching it would require global greenhouse gas emissions to fall by 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent five years later and 69 per cent by 2040, compared with 2025 levels. Emissions reached 58.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, roughly steady on 2024, according to the report's lead author, Dr Anne Olhoff.

The World Meteorological Organization added that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record 426.8 parts per million, or 153 per cent of its level in 1750. The UN Environment Programme said the outlook is worse than last year's report, in part because of the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and upward revisions of estimates of past emissions. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, said passing the threshold should not discourage countries from pushing harder to limit further warming. Hart put it more bluntly: "Overshoot is not surrender. Overshoot should really lead to a much greater degree of urgency."

The human cost is already visible. Droughts, floods, storms and heatwaves were the leading drivers of acute food insecurity for nearly 88 million people across 16 countries, according to the World Food Programme. The agency said the El Niño now sweeping across continents is expected to peak between October and December and has the potential to become the strongest on record. Between January and September, the programme reached 4.9 million people with early warnings and provided cash payments worth over a million and a half dollars ahead of forecast floods, storms and droughts, with every dollar invested generating up to seven dollars in avoided losses.

Why finance is the sticking point

Solar power, electric vehicles and battery storage are advancing fast, but the money to deploy them is not reaching the countries that need it most. Emerging and developing economies outside China, home to nearly two-thirds of the world's population, received less than a fifth of global clean energy investment. Africa illustrates the gap: despite enormous renewable energy potential, the continent attracts only a small share of investment, while around six hundred million people still lack access to electricity. Hart said financing a renewable energy project in a developing country can cost several times more than the same project in a wealthier nation, and that debt-burdened governments have limited room to invest in healthcare, education and climate protection. He said the summit must find finance solutions "that will not increase debt".

Adaptation finance is the sharpest example. The UN Environment Programme's Adaptation Gap Report calculated that low- and middle-income countries will need between 310 billion and 365 billion dollars a year for adaptation by 2035. The commitment made at COP30 to triple adaptation finance remains far below those needs, with no clear plan for delivering the money, according to CARE International. The aid agency is urging wealthy countries to set out credible plans to deliver the three hundred billion dollar annual climate finance goal agreed at COP29, including at least a hundred and twenty billion dollars a year for adaptation by then. Marlene Achoki, CARE's global climate justice policy and advocacy lead, said the focus in Antalya "must shift from promises to delivery", and that what matters is how much finance arrives, when it arrives, and whether it reaches the communities who need it most.

Reasons for optimism

Ten years ago, fewer than 1 in 100 new cars sold worldwide was electric. Last year it was one in four, and that share is expected to reach 28 per cent this year. The world added more than 600 gigawatts of solar power capacity over the same period, accounting for over 75 per cent of new renewable power capacity. Global battery storage capacity is now more than tenfold its 2021 level, with 108 gigawatts added in that year alone. "The good news in this horrible situation of overshoot is that the world has never been better equipped to solve this challenge," Hart said, pointing to the rapid expansion of electric vehicles, solar energy and battery storage.

The summit will not solve the climate crisis in a fortnight. But the summit could remove some of the barriers standing between the solutions already available and the people who need them, Hart said. The decisions to watch are the finance package, the launch of the stocktake, and the new national climate plans countries bring to Antalya. More background is available from UN News, from CARE International, and from the UNEP Emissions Gap Report coverage.