Antalya EXPO Center in Turkey is the venue for COP31Orhan Cicek/Anadolu via Getty Images

The Mediterranean beachside haven of Antalya in Turkey is more used to hosting well-fed tourists than stressed climate negotiators. But for two weeks starting on 9 November, the city will become the climate change capital of the world, welcoming tens of thousands of delegates to the UN COP31 summit.

COP31 is the latest instalment of the annual climate summits where countries come together with the aim of tackling climate change. The meetings were responsible for ushering in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the climate treaty under which nations have promised to hold warming to “well below” 2°C and as close to 1.5°C as possible.

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But in recent years, the summits have had a less impressive track record. Critics argue the meetings are no longer fit for purpose, undermined by the need for unanimous consensus in all decisions and struggling to find direction now that the work of agreeing a legal climate treaty is completed.

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Delegates left last year’s COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, having agreed the bare minimum – that they remain united behind the Paris Agreement. But after a fortnight of tortuous negotiations, they were unable to agree on fresh commitments to move away from fossil fuel use or end deforestation.

And although the world is now on course for lower levels of warming than looked likely before the Paris Agreement was struck, global emissions are still not falling and the world is on track for 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century – nowhere near the goals laid out under Paris.

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So can this upcoming summit, COP31, change the game?

This year’s brutal weather should provide plenty of motivation. From devastating glacier collapses to severe heatwaves and raging wildfires, there has been no shortage of reminders that planet Earth is teetering on the brink of crisis. And that all came ahead of a super-sized El Niño now under way in the Pacific, a timely demonstration of what warming beyond 1.5°C will feel like in the real world – hot and dangerous, in short.

But don’t expect fireworks from this COP. So far, the mood music from the hosts – a joint gig between Turkey and Australia – is setting the tone for a business-as-usual summit.

Hangovers from Belém

As with recent summits, there’s no big declaration or new treaty pegged for Antalya. Instead, the main task negotiators face will be to grapple with a series of hangover decisions from Belém.

At COP30, countries agreed to create a “just transition mechanism”, which has alternatively been described as a “platform”, a “hub” and a “work programme”. The idea is to provide a support structure for those affected by the shift to a cleaner economy. For example, countries need to work out how best to support and retrain workers in the fossil fuel economy as energy grids transition to cleaner fuels. But the process of identifying how this just transition mechanism will work in practice has barely begun.

Nations also agreed to triple adaptation finance for lower-income countries – in short, helping them cope with the impacts of climate change – by 2035. But the commitment was vague, with no baseline year and no agreement on who should contribute or what types of finance would count. Delegates in Antalya will continue to hammer out the details.

“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.

Road map to nowhere?

One of the biggest disappointments from COP30 was that countries failed to commit to developing “road maps” away from fossil fuels. This would involve drawing up plans for moving their economies away from oil, gas and coal use. Although the idea had backing from more than 80 nations in Brazil, the final text from the summit failed to mention fossil fuels at all.

Countries that still backed the idea gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April this year and jointly promised to draw up transition plans. However, to date, only France has produced anything like a fully fledged road map away from fossil fuels. Some countries are expected to announce their road maps on the sidelines of COP31, but it is unclear whether any major fossil fuel economies will come forward.

And despite a global oil crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that makes the case for clean energy ever more obvious, it is unlikely the road map idea will make it into the formal COP agenda this year.

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Instead, the summit’s hosts are pushing electrification as a route away from fossil fuels. The more you can electrify cars, home heating and the like, the faster the clean transition, the thinking goes. 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 the current rate of about 23 per cent.

We don’t yet know whether this would be a voluntary pledge countries would sign up to, or something that the hosts will push to be universally agreed under the main negotiations. Questions also remain over whether the target will 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.

Geopolitical headaches

Meanwhile, there are some serious headwinds facing the summit. In the face of 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 in the UK, where spending is set to fall by £6.5 billion to a historical low in 2027/2028. That leaves less money for funding climate action in lower-income countries, who in turn say they can’t take action to cut emissions without more cash. Arguments over funding risk souring the atmosphere of the summit.

Then there’s the awkward issue of the hosts. Both Turkey and Australia wanted to host COP31 and neither would back down, so the UN awarded them joint hosting responsibilities. Turkey is responsible for the location and logistics, as well as the so-called Action Agenda, which includes the pledges, commitments and announcements outside of the negotiations. Australia, meanwhile, will run the formal talks. But running a successful COP is a major challenge even for one country. With two countries in charge, there’s a real risk of things drifting into confusion and infighting. Questions over their commitment to the cause linger over both countries, who have each been slow to embrace the energy transition and still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

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But there are a few spots of hope too. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a historic fourth term as president last month, defying expectations to beat right-wing populist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory means Brazil’s delegation will be in Turkey pushing for more progress on deforestation and fossil fuel transition road maps.

Meanwhile, Democrats may take control of the US Congress in midterm elections on 3 November, just before COP31 kicks off. A win for the Democrats 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 will bolster morale among delegates.

What’s the headline?

In the formal negotiations track, there will be further talks on how the different “implementation” programmes on cutting emissions and ensuring a fair transition will work in practice. But these are unlikely to produce any 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.

A cover decision, which can summarise key decisions or include new pledges, could offer the opportunity for nations to present a new 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.

Negotiations over the wording of the cover decisions often provide the dramatic finale for a COP summit. But it can become a trap for 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 come into a COP 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.” It means COPs often end up “focused on yet another decision where we change the adverb”, he says.

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Watkinson wants to see COP summits focus much less on headlines generated by cover texts, and more on the backroom work to get countries to collaborate and communicate with each other. “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 focus less on a consensus outcome with all parties, with action instead delivered by smaller groups of willing participants who work together to concentrate on delivering emissions cuts, he says.

It looks likely that the Antalya summit, despite its postcard-worthy setting, will be an unglamourous mix of long nights and bitter quarrels, reluctant compromises and underwhelming outcomes.

But for meeting insiders, the hope is that change will come in time for COP33 in two years’ time, when countries are due to conclude a global assessment of their progress to decarbonisation. The pressure will be even greater on that COP to deliver a meaningful response to the stocktake’s findings. The question is, can these summits 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.”