The 31st UN climate conference, COP31, opens in Antalya, Türkiye, on Monday, November 9, and runs to November 20, with representatives of more than 190 countries due to take part. Türkiye hosts and holds the presidency, while Australia leads the negotiations, working with Pacific island countries, an unusual split of the two roles. A World Leaders Summit is scheduled for November 11 and 12, inside the conference window.
The arithmetic delegates bring with them is stark. A UN synthesis of national climate plans published on October 27 found that the 127 new plans submitted by 154 parties, covering about 71 percent of 2019 global emissions, point to 2035 emissions on average about 6 percent below 2019 levels, within a range of 0 to 12 percent. A pathway consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees needs a cut of about 60 percent over the same period. The presidency itself has told parties the world is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees within a few years, with a peak of about 1.8 degrees in the best case, UN reporting says.
That is why the hosts bill this as an implementation conference. The fights that matter are about money and machinery rather than new headline targets: delivery of the collective climate finance goal, whether adaptation finance can credibly be tripled against a developing country need the UN Environment Programme puts at about 305 billion dollars a year, the design and governance of the just transition mechanism agreed last year for workers and communities moving away from fossil fuels, and the first funding requests to the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. The conference also launches the second global stocktake, the five year review that will frame the next round of national plans. The presidency’s flagship ask is electrification, with a pledge to raise electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35 percent by 2035.
The technology backdrop is not the obstacle it was. Electric vehicles were about one in four new cars sold worldwide in 2025 and are expected to reach 28 percent in 2026, more than 600 gigawatts of solar capacity was added in 2025, and global battery storage capacity is now 11 times its 2021 level, UN News reported. The distribution is the obstacle: emerging and developing economies outside China, home to nearly two thirds of the world’s population, received just 18 percent of global clean energy investment in 2025, and about 600 million people in Africa still lack electricity, because financing clean projects in those economies costs several times more than in wealthier ones.
What to watch by November 20 is specific: a working design for the just transition mechanism, a credible path on adaptation finance, whether loss and damage funding requests actually move, and whether any major emitter signals a stronger plan. India arrives with a new 2031 to 2035 plan, approved by its cabinet in March, aiming for about 60 percent non-fossil installed capacity by 2035 and a 47 percent cut in the emissions intensity of GDP from 2005 levels, and it will press, as it has before, on finance from developed countries.