COP31 Opens in Antalya as Nearly 200 Nations Gather With the 1.5°C Goal Already Breached and the US Staying Away

The world’s annual climate talks open in Antalya on Monday, November 9, 2026, and they arrive carrying a weight no previous round of negotiations has had to bear. Delegations from nearly 200 countries are gathering on Turkiye’s Mediterranean coast for COP31, the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, at a moment when the central promise of the Paris Agreement has already slipped out of reach, when the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is staying away, and when the gap between what governments have pledged and what the science demands has never been wider. The fortnight runs until November 20, and it is billed, by its hosts and by the United Nations alike, as a summit about delivery rather than declaration: the point is no longer to agree new targets in principle, but to show that the targets already agreed can actually be carried out. Whether that framing survives contact with twelve days of hard bargaining is the question that will decide whether Antalya is remembered as a turning point or as another year in which the world’s climate diplomacy talked while the planet warmed. The COP31 opens Antalya November 2026 gathering is where that question gets its next answer.

1. Why Antalya, and why now

Antalya was not the obvious choice for a climate summit, and the road to this opening day was itself a small study in how climate diplomacy works when the stakes are high and the politics are harder. Turkiye, a country that straddles Europe and Asia and whose own economy still leans heavily on coal and gas, offered to host the talks, and its bid was accepted after a contest in which Australia also sought the presidency. The compromise that emerged is unusual even by the standards of these conferences: Turkiye hosts the summit and provides the venue, while Australia takes charge of the formal negotiations. That split is meant to give the talks both a host with the logistical muscle to run a gathering of more than 100,000 people and a presiding team with a reputation for steady chairmanship. It also means that the success or failure of the fortnight will be shared between two governments that have, at different times, been criticised at home and abroad for the pace of their own climate action. The symbolism is hard to miss: a summit about whether countries can act together is being run, quite literally, by two countries acting together.

1.1 A presidency shared between two countries

The arrangement at the top of COP31 is the first thing delegates notice when they arrive, and it shapes everything that follows. Murat Kurum, Turkiye’s environment minister, is the COP31 President-Designate, the public face of the summit and the person who will chair the high-level segments, while Australian officials lead the formal negotiating tracks where the text is actually written. Reports from the pre-summit briefings describe Kurum addressing early assemblies on the implementation framework, setting out Turkiye’s pitch that this should be a summit that turns promises into projects. The division of labour is a deliberate answer to a real problem: the host country of a COP traditionally holds the presidency, and the presidency carries enormous power over the pace and shape of the talks, yet the competition between Turkiye and Australia for that role had threatened to become a distraction in itself. Sharing the job was the way to end the contest without a loser. The risk is that a split presidency blurs accountability when the talks hit their hardest moments, usually in the second week, when ministers arrive and the overnight sessions begin. If the fortnight ends in agreement, both countries will claim the credit; if it ends in deadlock, each will be able to point at the other.

1.2 The calendar: twelve days, two summits

The formal schedule runs from November 9 to November 20, and within it there are really two summits. The first week belongs to the negotiators, the technical experts and the ministers who work through the detail of programmes on finance, adaptation and the transition away from fossil fuels. The second week belongs to the political endgame, when the unresolved questions are pushed up to ministerial level and, in the final days, to the presidency itself. In between sits the World Leaders’ Summit on November 11 and 12, which is expected to draw more than 90 heads of state and government, and which will open with speeches by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Among the leaders expected in Antalya are Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, on his first international visit since winning re-election, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The venue is the Antalya Expo Center, a 1.1-million-square-metre site divided into a Blue Zone, where official negotiations and high-level meetings take place behind accreditation barriers, and a Green Zone, open to the public, business and civil society. More than 100,000 participants are expected across the fortnight, with delegations from 197 countries.

2. The numbers that frame the fortnight

Every COP is shadowed by a set of numbers, and this one is shadowed by numbers that are worse than the ones that greeted the last summit. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report for 2026, released ahead of the talks, is the document most delegates will be quoting in the corridors, and its central finding is blunt: under current policies, the world is heading for about 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming this century, and even if every national pledge now on the table were fully implemented, the figure would still be about 2.6 degrees. Those numbers sit beside another stark fact reported in the run-up to the summit: emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2025 remained near a record high, meaning that the world is still adding to the problem faster than it is subtracting from it. The arithmetic of the gap report is what gives Antalya its urgency and also its difficulty, because closing a gap of that size requires not one decision but a whole programme of them, on finance, on energy, on forests and on the rules by which countries hold each other to account. The numbers do not negotiate, and the delegates in Antalya know that they will be measured against them when the fortnight ends.

2.1 What the emissions gap report says

The Emissions Gap Report is the United Nations’ annual audit of the distance between where the world is heading and where it needs to be, and the 2026 edition is among the bleakest. Its headline projection, that current policies point to roughly 2.8 degrees of warming by the end of the century, is not a forecast of what will happen but a measure of what today’s policies would produce if nothing changed. The companion figure, about 2.6 degrees if all current national pledges were fully delivered, is in some ways the more damning of the two, because it shows that even full delivery of what governments have already promised would still leave the world far above the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals. The report’s message to Antalya is therefore not simply that ambition must rise, but that the pledges already made must actually be implemented, and that the gap between promise and delivery is now as large a problem as the gap between delivery and what the science requires. Delegates will spend much of the fortnight arguing about the mechanisms that could narrow that second gap: finance for developing countries, the rules of the just transition, and the stocktake process that is meant to keep pressure on governments between summits.

2.2 The 1.5°C line, crossed

The most consequential number at COP31 is not a projection but a line already crossed. The Paris Agreement set a goal of holding warming well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees, and for a decade that 1.5-degree figure was the summit’s north star. In September 2026, the United Nations said that breaching the 1.5-degree limit was now almost certain, a judgment that reframes the entire purpose of the talks. Crossing 1.5 degrees does not mean the world has fallen off a cliff in a single year; scientists describe it in terms of a long-term average, and a single hot year does not by itself settle the question. But the direction is unmistakable, and the political meaning is that the goal the Paris Agreement was built around is now, on the best available evidence, out of reach in the form in which it was originally set. That changes the argument in Antalya in two ways. It makes the case for faster cuts stronger, because every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5 brings more heatwaves, more floods and more lost harvests. And it makes the case for adaptation stronger too, because the warming that is now unavoidable must be lived with, and the countries least responsible for causing it are the ones who will pay the highest price for it.

3. The absent superpower

No single fact hangs over COP31 more heavily than the absence of the United States. President Donald Trump withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement, and the formal exit took effect on January 27, 2026, followed by an announced withdrawal from the climate convention itself. The result is that the world’s largest historical emitter, and one of its largest current emitters, will not be at the negotiating table in Antalya. That absence matters in practical ways as well as symbolic ones: the United States has historically been a major source of climate finance, a major voice in the design of the rules, and, under other administrations, a major driver of ambition. Its withdrawal removes a large block of finance and a large block of diplomatic weight from the room at the same time, and it hands other countries a ready-made excuse for doing less. It also matters because the absence is not an accident of scheduling but a deliberate policy choice, and every delegation in Antalya will be calculating what it means for the durability of any agreement reached without the world’s largest economy inside it.

3.1 What the US withdrawal means in practice

In practice, the American withdrawal changes the maths of the summit before a single word is negotiated. Climate finance is the most obvious casualty: the United States has been one of the largest contributors to the funds that help poorer countries adapt to warming and build clean energy, and its departure leaves a hole that other donors have not yet filled. The withdrawal also changes the politics of the negotiating room, because the country that has so often played the role of broker between the European Union, China and the developing world is no longer there to play it. Some observers argue that the absence could, paradoxically, make agreement easier, since the United States has in the past been among the countries most resistant to binding language on fossil fuels and on finance. Others argue the opposite, that without the largest economy in the room, any agreement will carry less weight and less money, and that the signal it sends to other governments is that climate commitments can be walked away from when politics change. Both arguments will be tested in Antalya, and the answer will only become clear when the final text is read.

3.2 Who is still in the room from America

The United States may be absent from the negotiating table, but America is not entirely absent from Antalya. Reports ahead of the summit indicate that several prominent members of the US Congress, along with businesspeople and representatives of American civil society groups, are expected to attend, and their presence matters for what happens after the fortnight ends. Congressional delegates cannot negotiate on behalf of the government, but they can signal to other countries that American climate politics is not a single story, and that a future administration might return to the table. American businesses, particularly in clean energy, have their own reasons to be in the room: the market for solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles does not stop at national borders, and companies want the rules of that market to be written with them in mind. Civil society groups, from environmental organisations to youth activists, will be there to argue that the absence of the federal government makes the work of everyone else more important, not less. Their presence will not fill the hole left by the withdrawal, but it will remind the delegates that the country that walked away is not the same as the people who live in it.

4. Money: the argument that decides everything

If there is one argument that decides whether a COP succeeds or fails, it is money. The developing world has said for years that it cannot cut emissions and adapt to warming without finance from the countries that grew rich by burning fossil fuels, and the developed world has said for years that the sums being asked for are beyond what public budgets can bear. COP31 arrives with that argument unresolved and with the sums larger than ever. The central finance question in Antalya is the tripling of adaptation funding for lower-income economies by 2035, a target agreed in outline at the previous summit and now in need of a delivery plan. Around it sit the older questions that have never quite been settled: how much of the finance should be grants rather than loans, how much should flow through the funds that already exist, and how the private sector, which controls far more capital than any government, can be brought into a system that was designed for public money. The answers will not be found in a single session; they will be bargained over in the finance track for the whole fortnight, and the final text will be judged, above all, by whether the numbers in it are real.

4.1 Adaptation finance and the tripling promise

The tripling promise is the clearest test of whether Antalya can deliver on money. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report, released in Nairobi on November 4, 2026, put the scale of the problem in numbers that are hard to argue with: developing countries will need around 305 billion dollars a year by 2035 to adapt to the warming that is already locked in, while international public adaptation finance reached only 28.2 to 31.7 billion dollars in 2024, up by just a billion on the year before. Tripling that flow by 2035, as governments have aspired to do, would reach roughly 85 to 120 billion dollars a year, which sounds large until it is set against the need: after inflation, it would still cover only about a fifth to just under a third of what is required. The gap between the tripling aspiration and the actual need is the reason the finance negotiations are so hard, because the countries that need the money most are being asked to accept a target that everyone involved knows falls short, while the countries being asked to pay are being asked to triple their contributions at a time when their own budgets are under pressure. The delivery plan that emerges from Antalya, if one emerges at all, will be judged on whether it closes any of that distance or simply restates the aspiration in new language.

4.2 Loss and damage, one year on

Alongside adaptation sits the newer and more politically charged question of loss and damage, the harm from climate change that can no longer be adapted to: the homes destroyed by floods, the farmland lost to the sea, the lives disrupted by disasters that no amount of preparation could have prevented. The Loss and Damage Fund, agreed after years of argument, held its first funding round ahead of COP31, and the figures from that round tell their own story. Countries requested 2.8 billion dollars and the envelope available was 342 million, a ratio that left most applicants with a fraction of what they had asked for. The fund’s defenders say that a first round was always going to be small, and that the point was to prove the mechanism works before scaling it up. Its critics say that a fund which can meet barely an eighth of the demand in its first round is a symbol of the wider failure, and that the countries most affected by climate disasters cannot wait for the mechanism to mature. In Antalya, the fund will be discussed as part of the wider finance package, and the question will be whether the summit can agree to put it on a path to the scale its purpose demands, or whether it remains a well-intentioned pilot while the losses it was created to address keep growing.

5. Fossil fuels and forests

The second great argument of COP31, after money, is about the fuels and the forests that decide how fast the world warms. The previous summit in Belem produced a commitment to move away from fossil fuels, but the language of that commitment was deliberately broad, and the question of what it means in practice has been argued ever since. Antalya is where that argument is supposed to turn into a plan. Two roadmaps drawn up by Brazil, which hosted the last summit and remains a central player in these talks, are expected to be at the heart of the discussion: one sets out a path for moving away from fossil fuels, and the other deals with halting deforestation. Both are the kind of document that sounds technical and turns out to be political, because a roadmap for ending fossil fuels is also a roadmap for the economies that depend on them, and a roadmap for halting deforestation is also a roadmap for the farmers, miners and loggers whose livelihoods depend on the land. The test for both will be whether they contain dates, numbers and obligations, or whether they remain statements of direction that each country can read in its own way.

5.1 Brazil’s two roadmaps

Brazil’s role in Antalya is unusual: it hosted the previous summit, it is the author of the two roadmaps that will shape this one, and its president, Lula da Silva, is expected to attend the leaders’ summit in person. The fossil fuel roadmap is the more contentious of the two, because it asks countries to agree on a sequence for winding down coal, oil and gas, and every country has a different sequence in mind. Oil producers want a slower path that protects their revenues; island states want a faster one that protects their existence; large consumers like China and India want a path that does not cut off the energy their economies still need. The deforestation roadmap is, in principle, easier to agree on, because almost every country says it wants forests protected, but the record of past promises on forests is poor, and the drivers of deforestation, from cattle ranching to mining to smallholder farming, are deeply embedded in the economies of the countries where the forests stand. Both roadmaps will be debated in the negotiating tracks and in the corridors, and their fate will be one of the clearest measures of whether Antalya produced anything that lasts beyond the fortnight.

5.2 The just transition question

Behind both roadmaps sits the question that has become the moral centre of the climate talks: the just transition, the idea that the move away from fossil fuels must not be paid for by the workers and communities who depend on them. A coal miner in Poland, an oil worker in Nigeria, a truck driver in Turkiye, none of them caused climate change on their own, and all of them stand to lose their livelihoods if the transition is handled badly. The just transition mechanism, which Australia is expected to lead the negotiations on, is meant to be the answer: a programme that ties the phase-out of fossil fuels to investment in new jobs, retraining and social protection, so that the costs of change are shared rather than dumped on the people least able to bear them. The difficulty is that a just transition costs money, and the money has to come from somewhere, which brings the argument back to finance. It is also difficult because the transition looks different in every country, and a mechanism designed in a negotiating room in Antalya has to work in a mining town, a port city and a farming region at the same time. If the summit can agree on a credible just transition programme, it will have done something that matters to people far beyond the conference halls; if it cannot, the fossil fuel roadmap will be read, fairly or not, as a plan written by people who do not have to live with its consequences.

6. The rules of the room

The third argument of COP31 is about the rules by which the talks themselves are run, and it is the argument that may matter most in the long run. The climate conferences decide by consensus, which means that any single country can block an agreement, and critics have long said that the rule allows a small number of countries to hold the whole process hostage. As COP31 opens, those calls for reform are louder than they have ever been, with diplomats and experts arguing that a system designed to protect every country’s interests has become a system that protects the interests of the countries least willing to act. The defenders of consensus reply that it is the only rule that gives every country, large and small, an equal voice, and that without it the smaller and poorer countries would be steamrolled by the larger ones. The argument is not new, but the context is: with the 1.5-degree goal slipping away and emissions still near record levels, the cost of a system that produces the lowest common denominator is rising, and the patience of the countries that want faster action is wearing thin.

6.1 Consensus under pressure

The case against consensus is easy to state and hard to answer. In a room of nearly 200 countries, a single holdout can block a decision that the other 199 support, and the history of these conferences is full of moments when a deal was watered down or lost entirely because one delegation refused to agree. Experts and diplomats quoted ahead of Antalya said plainly that the meeting is unlikely to deliver a major breakthrough without changes to the way the conferences reach agreements, and the pressure for reform has been building for years. The case for keeping consensus is also easy to state: the climate talks are one of the few international processes in which small island states sit as equals with great powers, and that equality depends on the rule that nobody can be outvoted. A move to majority voting might speed up decisions, but it would also hand power to the largest blocs, and the countries that would lose out are precisely the ones most exposed to climate change. The most likely outcome in Antalya is not a formal change to the rules, which would itself require consensus, but a set of workarounds: decisions taken in smaller groups, agreements that proceed without the holdouts, and a growing willingness to let the willing move ahead while the unwilling are left behind. Whether that is a reform or an admission of failure is a question the fortnight will have to answer.

6.2 The second Global Stocktake begins

One piece of machinery that is supposed to keep the pressure on between summits is the Global Stocktake, the periodic review of how the world as a whole is doing against the goals of the Paris Agreement. The first stocktake, concluded at the Dubai summit, produced the call to transition away from fossil fuels; the second stocktake is launched at COP31 and will run until 2028, when its conclusions will feed into the next round of national pledges. The stocktake matters because it is the mechanism by which the gap between promises and delivery is measured in public, and because its findings are hard for governments to ignore when they are asked to set new targets. The launch in Antalya will set the terms of reference for the next two years of work: what data is collected, which voices are heard, and how the findings are presented. A strong stocktake process, with clear metrics and independent input, could become the engine that drives ambition upward; a weak one, captured by the countries with the most to hide, could become another exercise in stating the obvious. The delegates who design it this fortnight will be deciding, in effect, how honest the world is prepared to be with itself about the state of the climate.

7. Science on day one

The opening day of COP31 is not only about politics; it is also about science, and the science has a prominent place on the first day’s programme. Earth Information Day, held on November 9 and coordinated by the United Nations climate body, brings together the agencies that watch the planet, from the World Meteorological Organization to the satellite operators and the oceanographers, to present the latest picture of a warming world. The theme this year, “From Observations to Application”, captures the shift that the organisers want to see: it is no longer enough to measure the warming, and the question now is what the measurements mean for the decisions that have to be taken. The day’s sessions, running from midday to mid-afternoon Greenwich Mean Time, will cover the state of the climate system, the tools available to track it, and the ways in which better data can support better adaptation. For the delegates, it is a reminder that the arguments they will spend the fortnight having are arguments about a physical reality that does not wait for consensus.

7.1 Earth Information Day

Earth Information Day is the summit’s way of putting the evidence on the table before the bargaining begins, and the evidence it presents is the product of a global observing system that has grown steadily more capable. Satellites now track sea level, ice loss, forest cover and greenhouse gas concentrations with a precision that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, and the data they produce feeds directly into the models that project where the climate is heading. The day’s programme, themed “From Observations to Application”, is designed to close the gap between the people who collect the data and the people who have to act on it, and to make the case that investment in observation is investment in the decisions that follow. For the countries most exposed to climate change, better data means better early warning systems, better planning for floods and droughts, and a stronger basis for the claims they make in the finance negotiations. For the summit as a whole, the day is a statement that the talks are grounded in measurement rather than opinion, and that the measurements are getting worse.

7.2 The Antalya AI Pledge

Alongside the science sits a newer question that COP31 is among the first summits to address directly: the role of artificial intelligence in the climate crisis. The voluntary Antalya AI Pledge, launched at the summit, brings attention to both sides of that question: the ways in which AI can help, by improving weather forecasting, optimising energy grids and tracking deforestation, and the ways in which it can hurt, because the data centres that power AI consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. The pledge is voluntary, which means that no country is obliged to sign it and none of its commitments are binding, and critics will say that a voluntary pledge on AI is the kind of gesture that costs nothing and changes nothing. Its supporters will say that the point is to put the issue on the agenda before it becomes too large to manage, and that the first step towards governing a technology is to agree that it needs governing. Either way, the pledge is a sign of how the climate talks are changing: the agenda now includes questions that did not exist when the Paris Agreement was signed, and the summit’s ability to keep up with them will be part of how it is judged.

8. What remains unconfirmed and what to watch next

For all the preparation, much of what will decide COP31 is still unconfirmed on the opening day, and the honest position is to say so. Whether the leaders’ summit produces new pledges or only restates old ones, whether the finance track can agree a delivery plan for the tripling promise, whether the fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps gain dates and numbers or remain statements of direction, and whether the consensus question produces reform or another round of frustration, none of these can be known until the fortnight unfolds. The opening day is, by design, a beginning, and the most that can be said about it is that the pieces are on the board: nearly 200 delegations, a breached temperature goal, an absent superpower, a finance gap measured in hundreds of billions, and a set of rules under strain. What happens next depends on the bargaining of the next twelve days, and on whether the leaders who arrive on November 11 bring with them the willingness to close the gaps that the negotiators cannot close on their own.

8.1 The leaders’ summit test

The first real test comes on November 11 and 12, when the World Leaders’ Summit opens with speeches from President Erdogan and Secretary-General Guterres. Leaders’ summits are often dismissed as theatre, and there is some truth in that: the speeches are written in advance, the cameras are arranged, and the substance is usually settled in advance by officials. But they matter for a different reason, which is that they are the moment when heads of government put their personal authority behind a position, and that authority is harder to walk back than a negotiator’s draft. If Lula, Burnham and the other leaders who attend use their speeches to announce new finance, new targets or new coalitions, the fortnight will have momentum that no amount of technical negotiation can create on its own. If they use them to restate positions already known, the talks will settle into the familiar pattern of a slow first week and a frantic second one. The test, in short, is whether the leaders treat Antalya as a place to decide or as a place to be seen.

8.2 What to watch next

The things to watch over the next twelve days are the same things that have decided every recent summit, and they are worth listing plainly. Watch the finance text, and whether the tripling promise gains a delivery plan with numbers and dates attached. Watch the language on fossil fuels, and whether the roadmap moves from direction to obligation. Watch the deforestation roadmap, and whether it is backed by money for the countries asked to protect their forests. Watch the stocktake, and whether its design is strong enough to hold governments to account. And watch the final days, when the presidency must decide whether to push for a text that some countries oppose or to settle for a text that everyone can accept. The coming weeks will provide the answers.

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