ANTALYA, Türkiye — The United Nations climate conference COP31 opened on Monday in Antalya, where negotiators from more than 190 countries will spend two weeks testing whether years of climate promises can be turned into delivery, according to the UN Climate Change secretariat.
The conference runs from November 9 to 20 at the Antalya Expo Center. Türkiye hosts the meeting and holds the presidency, with Environment Minister Murat Kurum nominated as COP31 President. Australia’s climate and energy minister, Chris Bowen, serves as President of Negotiations, an arrangement agreed at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, and described by the United Nations University as the first shared presidency in the history of the talks. A World Leaders’ Summit follows on November 11 and 12, and organisers expect more than 100,000 people across the two weeks.
The presidency has billed COP31 as an implementation conference, focused less on new pledges and more on carrying out the ones already made. Its flagship goal is electrification: raising electricity’s share of the world’s final energy demand to 35 percent by 2035, from about a fifth today, by replacing fuel burning cars, heating and industry with electric alternatives.
The scientific backdrop is hard. A UN synthesis published on October 27 found that the 127 new national climate plans submitted by 154 parties, covering about 71 percent of 2019 global emissions, point to 2035 emissions on average only 6 percent below 2019 levels. A path consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius needs a cut of about 60 percent. On current plans, warming is put at about 1.7 to 2.3 degrees, and the COP31 presidency’s own letter to parties says the world is likely to pass 1.5 degrees within a few years. Brazil, which held the COP30 presidency, published on November 3 the first global roadmap for moving away from fossil fuels, a document that will shadow the Antalya talks even though the transition is not formally on the agenda.
Money is the other central fight. Developing countries want the New Collective Quantified Goal, the finance framework meant to replace the old 100 billion dollars a year promise, turned into binding commitments covering both emissions cuts and adaptation. The UN Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report, released on November 4, estimated adaptation needs at about 305 billion dollars a year, against the 85 to 120 billion that even a tripling of current finance would provide.
The United States is present under a cloud: its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement took effect on January 27, 2026, under the agreement’s one year notice rule, which weakens the finance and emissions arithmetic every other delegation is working with. What happens next in Antalya will be decided in stages, the leaders’ summit this week, then a week of technical bargaining over finance, adaptation and the fossil fuel roadmap, before a closing text on November 20 shows whether the implementation label produced anything measurable.
