COP31 Ends First Week in Antalya With Climate Finance Pledges Down 70% as Nations Back Carbon Markets and Energy Efficient Buildings

Introduction

The first week of the COP31 climate summit in Antalya ended on Friday, November 13, 2026, with a split picture that has become familiar at United Nations climate talks: real deals signed in the meeting rooms, and a widening gap between what countries have promised and what the poorest nations say they need.

Delegates from nearly 200 countries have spent five days in the Mediterranean resort city arguing over money, over how fast the world should move away from fossil fuels, and over whether the pledges made at earlier summits still mean anything. The summit runs until November 20, and the hardest decisions have been pushed into its second week. This is the story of what happened in Antalya so far, what was agreed, what stalled, and what the final week must still decide. COP31 Antalya climate finance November 2026.

1. The First Week in Antalya

The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP31, opened on Monday, November 9, 2026, in Antalya, on Türkiye’s Mediterranean coast. It is the largest gathering of its kind in the country’s history, with about 68,500 people registered to attend, according to figures reported by the AFP news agency, and nearly 25,000 more people working to keep the event running. The sessions are being held at the Antalya Expo Center, a vast exhibition complex adapted from the site of the city’s 2016 World Expo, in the Soğucaksu area of the city. For two weeks, negotiators, ministers, scientists, business leaders and activists are packed into its halls, trying to turn years of climate promises into plans that can actually be carried out.

The summit is being run under an arrangement never tried before at a climate conference. Türkiye holds the formal presidency and its environment minister, Murat Kurum, is the conference president. Australia, which had competed with Türkiye to host the summit, is leading the actual negotiations, with its climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, presiding over the talks. The two countries agreed to share the job after their contest over the hosting rights, and the split has shaped the summit from the start: Kurum speaks for the presidency, while Bowen chairs the rooms where the hard bargaining happens. The World Leaders’ Summit, the high-level political event that brings heads of state and government to the conference, was held on November 11 and 12 under the theme “Towards a Sustainable, Resilient and Equitable Future”.

1.1 The Opening and the Late Start

The conference did not begin smoothly. The opening plenary started almost an hour and a half late, held up by disagreements between developed and developing countries over climate finance, the question of who pays for the world’s response to a warming planet. It was a sign of what the week would be about. Simon Stiell, the United Nations’ executive secretary for climate change, told the opening session that the conference had to move from signalling to delivery, a phrase that has been repeated in the corridors ever since. His message was blunt: countries have spent years announcing targets and signing pledges, and the test of COP31 is whether any of it turns into action.

The outgoing COP president, André Corrêa do Lago of Brazil, handed over the presidency to Kurum at the opening, urging delegates to hold to the ethical principles of the negotiations. Kurum, for his part, warned that geopolitical fragmentation is complicating the response to climate change, a reference to the wars, trade disputes and political divisions that have made international cooperation harder in recent years. The backdrop to the summit is an ongoing global energy crisis and a renewed reliance on fossil fuels in many countries, a point made repeatedly in the opening days. The war in Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, pushing up global prices for petrol, oil and products made from them, such as fertilisers and pesticides, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Against that background, the delegates in Antalya are being asked to agree on faster cuts in emissions and bigger flows of money to the countries least able to cope.

1.2 Guterres and “Make or Bake”

The strongest language of the first week came from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. Addressing a gathering of around 80 world leaders at the summit, he told them it was “make or bake time”, a phrase that spread quickly through the conference and into the headlines. His meaning was plain: either the world acts now, or it lives with the consequences of a hotter planet. In his opening remarks he called for a “climate justice compact” that would tax fossil fuel companies and redirect the money to vulnerable nations, an idea that has support among developing countries and fierce opposition from the fossil fuel industry and the governments that depend on it.

Guterres also urged leaders to speed up cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, to advance a just transition away from fossil fuels, and to secure funding for the countries most exposed to climate damage. His intervention set the tone for the leaders’ summit, where presidents and prime ministers took turns describing the floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms their countries have endured. The speeches were, by the standards of these summits, unusually direct. But speeches are not decisions, and as the week wore on, the gap between the rhetoric in the plenary hall and the progress in the negotiating rooms became the story of the summit.

2. The Finance Gap at the Centre of the Talks

Money has dominated COP31, as it has dominated almost every climate summit of the past decade. Developing countries say they cannot cut emissions or adapt to rising temperatures without far more finance from the rich world. Developed countries say their budgets are stretched and that private capital must do more of the work. The first week produced a stark new measure of how wide that gap has become.

2.1 Pledges Down 70% From 2025

Analysis published by Carbon Brief, the climate news site, found that the amount of public climate finance pledged by developed nations for the coming years is around 70 percent lower than it was in 2025. Most of the existing pledges expired in 2025, and only five nations have announced new multi-year pledges, including just one major donor, the United Kingdom. On current pledges, public climate finance totals only about 11.7 billion dollars a year, a steep fall from the roughly 40 billion dollars a year spent in recent years. The figure was repeated through the week by campaigners and by negotiators from developing countries, who said it showed that the promises made at earlier summits were not being renewed.

The lack of new pledges is amplifying divisions at COP31, particularly in the negotiations over a new work programme for climate finance, the framework that will govern how money is counted, delivered and tracked in the years ahead. Those talks remained stalled as the first week drew to a close, according to Carbon Brief’s daily briefing from the summit, and the divisions over finance were expected to spill into other negotiating tracks in the coming days. For the small island states and the least developed countries, the numbers are not abstract. They are the difference between building sea walls and watching the sea take their land, between early warning systems and funerals after a storm.

2.2 The $300 Billion Promise and the $1.3 Trillion Road

The finance argument has a history that delegates in Antalya know well. Under the Baku to Belém Roadmap, agreed at earlier summits, poor countries are due to receive 300 billion dollars a year from industrialised nations by 2035, alongside about 1 trillion dollars from other sources, with the aim of scaling total climate finance to 1.3 trillion dollars a year by 2035. The roadmap was meant to be the bridge between the old finance goal and a new one. But the Carbon Brief analysis suggests the bridge is not being built fast enough, and negotiators in Antalya are arguing over how to get there.

The scale of the need was underlined by a report from the United Nations Environment Programme published before the summit. Its Adaptation Gap Report 2026 found that developing countries will need approximately 305 billion dollars a year by 2035 to finance measures to adapt to rising temperatures, from drought-resistant crops to flood defences. International public finance for adaptation stood at just 28.2 to 31.7 billion dollars in 2024, a fraction of what is needed. The gap between 30 billion and 305 billion is the number that hangs over every finance discussion in Antalya, and it is the reason developing countries have made adaptation finance one of their central demands at this summit.

3. The Antalya Statement on Carbon Markets

Against that difficult background, the first week did produce one headline deal. On Friday, November 13, sixteen nations unveiled the Antalya Statement, a declaration aimed at expanding international carbon credit markets and mobilising private sector capital for climate action. The statement introduces a synchronised policy playbook designed to quadruple the global carbon credit market to 21 billion dollars by 2035, up from an estimated market value of about 5.25 billion dollars in 2026.

3.1 Sixteen Nations and the $21 Billion Target

Fourteen countries signed the Antalya Statement at its launch, including Canada, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Luxembourg, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Türkiye, the United Kingdom and Zambia. Two more nations joined the group in the hours that followed, bringing the total to sixteen. The declaration was presented as a landmark agreement, and its backers say it is the first time a group of countries has agreed on a common playbook for growing carbon markets in a coordinated way, rather than each country setting its own rules and hoping the pieces fit together.

The idea behind the statement is simple to describe and hard to deliver. Carbon credits are permits that represent a tonne of carbon dioxide avoided or removed from the atmosphere, and they can be bought and sold so that companies and countries can offset their emissions. Supporters say a bigger, better regulated market would channel private money into clean energy, forest protection and other climate projects in developing countries. Critics say carbon markets have a history of weak rules, double counting and projects that do not deliver the emissions cuts they claim. The Antalya Statement is an attempt to answer those criticisms with common standards, and its test will be whether the market it creates is trusted enough to attract the money it promises.

3.2 The Eight-Lever Policy Playbook

At the centre of the Antalya Statement is a policy playbook setting out eight targeted levers intended to drive the expansion of the carbon market. The levers cover the rules governments need to put in place, from how credits are issued and verified to how they are traded across borders and how companies are encouraged to buy them. The details of the eight levers are technical, but the ambition is not: a fourfold increase in the size of the market within nine years, and a flow of private capital into climate projects that governments alone cannot fund.

Ministers and climate envoys are scheduled to meet on Monday, November 16, for a roundtable hosted by the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets and the Turkish COP31 presidency, where the next steps for the playbook will be discussed. The roundtable is one of the first events of the summit’s second week, and it will show whether the sixteen signatories can turn a declaration into a working programme. For now, the Antalya Statement stands as the most concrete outcome of the first week, and its supporters are presenting it as proof that COP31 can still produce results even while the bigger finance talks are stuck.

4. Buildings and Cities Take the Stage

The second major deal of the first week came from an unexpected corner of the climate agenda: buildings. On Thursday, November 12, more than 100 national leaders backed the Antalya Compact for Energy Efficient Buildings, setting two targets for 2035: a 25 percent cut in how much energy the world’s buildings consume in daily use, and faster take-up of efficient electric systems in buildings. The compact was endorsed at the first high-level dialogue on urban resilience ever held at a United Nations climate conference, as the summit turned its attention to cities, home to more than half of humanity.

4.1 The Antalya Compact: 25% Less Energy by 2035

Buildings are one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, responsible for heating, cooling, lighting and powering the places where people live and work. Yet they have rarely been the focus of a climate summit. The Antalya Compact changes that, at least on paper. Its two targets for 2035 are a 25 percent reduction in the operational energy use of buildings and a faster shift to efficient electric systems, from heat pumps to better insulation and smarter controls. More than 100 national leaders endorsed the compact, giving it a political weight that few sectoral pledges at climate summits achieve.

The compact matters because buildings are long-lived. A building constructed today will still be standing in 2070, and the energy it uses will be locked in for decades unless it is designed well or retrofitted. The countries that signed the compact are betting that a common target will push their construction industries, their building codes and their energy systems in the same direction. Whether the target is met will depend on national policies that have not yet been written, but the compact gives campaigners and businesses a number to hold governments to account against.

4.2 The First Urban Resilience Dialogue

The buildings compact was launched alongside the first high-level dialogue on urban resilience ever held at a United Nations climate conference. The dialogue brought together mayors, ministers and officials to discuss how cities can cope with rising temperatures, flooding and storms, and how the money for that work can be found. COP31 also launched the Sustainable Urban Resilience Financing Facility, a new mechanism designed to turn resilience priorities into bankable projects and to attract public and private finance for city-level climate work.

Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate change minister and the president of the negotiations, told the dialogue that climate change is an existential threat to the Pacific, a reminder that for the island nations of the Pacific, the stakes of these talks are not economic but existential. The focus on cities reflects a shift in how climate policy is discussed. For years, the summits have been dominated by national targets and global finance. Antalya is the first to give cities a formal place in the programme, and the urban resilience dialogue is likely to be one of the features of the summit that other conferences copy.

5. The Cover Decision and the 1.5C Question

Beyond the individual deals, the central document of any climate summit is the cover decision, the overarching text that records what the conference as a whole has agreed. At COP31, the cover decision has become the most contested piece of paper in Antalya, and its fate will decide whether the summit is remembered as a success or a failure.

5.1 The “Reflections” Text

On Friday, November 13, the COP31 presidency published a “reflections” text on the consultations it has been holding with heads of national delegations on a possible cover decision. The text is not a fully formed draft. It is an organised summary of the issues countries have said they would like to see included, a wish list that runs from a commitment to multilateralism and the principles of the Paris Agreement through to responding to the overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and the gaps in mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, finance, climate observation and data. It also lists the asks of developing countries, including that developed countries deliver on their obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, the provision that requires them to provide public climate finance, and the priorities of developed and vulnerable countries, such as recognising the central role of the best available science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The presidency’s move to publish the reflections text faced unprecedented procedural pushback from Russia and others, according to Carbon Brief, and talks continued through the day after its release. Closed consultations with heads of national delegations were scheduled to continue from 11 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon on Friday, and countries are expected to be asked to submit their views on the cover decision over the weekend, with a proper draft text emerging early next week. The reflections text is therefore a starting point, not a conclusion, and the distance between it and a final decision is a measure of how much work the second week still holds.

5.2 The Fossil Fuel Roadmap Debate

One of the most sensitive questions in the cover decision is what it says about fossil fuels. The reflections text mentions “welcoming” the fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps, a formulation that has been welcomed by some delegations and criticised by others as too weak. Small island nations have demanded faster emissions cuts, while fossil fuel producers have defended their development priorities, and the argument over the future of fossil fuels has run through the negotiating rooms all week. Amnesty International, in a statement ahead of the summit, urged a decisive phase-out of fossil fuels, arguing that the world cannot hold warming to safe levels while continuing to expand oil, gas and coal production.

The debate is not only about words. A roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels would set a direction for energy policy in every country, and the governments that depend on oil and gas revenues are resisting any language that commits them to a timetable. The countries most exposed to climate change say that without such a commitment, the summit will have failed. The cover decision will have to find language that both sides can accept, and that search is one of the reasons the presidency has moved carefully, publishing a reflections text rather than a draft, and asking for written submissions before it puts forward a text of its own.

6. The Science Behind the Summit

The negotiations in Antalya are taking place against a scientific backdrop that has grown darker with each passing year. The reports published in the run-up to COP31 describe a planet that is warming faster than expected, with consequences that are already visible in every region.

6.1 A Year of Record Heat

According to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization, 2026 is one of a series of years marked by unprecedented temperatures, glacier loss and rising sea levels. From January to September, the global average temperature was 1.47 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, compared with 1.55 degrees in 2024, which remains the warmest year on record. The figures mean that the world is already close to the 1.5 degree threshold set by the Paris Agreement, the level beyond which scientists say the risks of extreme weather, ecosystem collapse and irreversible change rise sharply.

The year has brought deadly heatwaves in Europe and beyond, devastating floods in Nepal, and a string of disasters that delegates in Antalya have cited in their speeches. The WMO report was published as the summit opened, and it has been quoted in the negotiating rooms as evidence that the talks cannot afford to fail. The science is no longer a forecast of what might happen. It is a description of what is already happening, and the delegates in Antalya are negotiating in the shadow of it.

6.2 El Niño and the Road Into 2027

The WMO warns that a strong El Niño is expected to push temperatures even higher and intensify extreme weather events into 2027. El Niño is a natural warming of the Pacific Ocean that affects weather patterns around the world, bringing drought to some regions and flooding to others. The 2026-2027 El Niño is described by the WMO’s secretary-general as exceptionally powerful, and its arrival means that the years ahead are likely to be hotter still, even before the long-term trend of human-caused warming is taken into account.

For the negotiators in Antalya, the El Niño forecast is a warning that the window for action is narrowing. The decisions taken at COP31 will shape how the world responds to the heat and the storms of the next two years, and the failure to agree on finance or on fossil fuels would leave the most vulnerable countries facing a hotter world with less help than they were promised. The science does not negotiate, and it does not wait for the second week. But the politics of the summit do, and the delegates know that the numbers in the WMO report will be quoted back at them when they return home.

7. Who Was There and Who Was Not

A climate summit is also a diplomatic event, and the question of who attends is itself a statement. COP31 has drawn leaders from around the world, but one absence has been noted more than any presence.

7.1 Leaders in Antalya

The World Leaders’ Summit on November 11 and 12 brought around 80 heads of state and government to Antalya. Among those due to attend were Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez, the acting president. Climate activists were also present in large numbers, including Greta Thunberg, whose call to prioritise people and the planet over profit was reported by Al Jazeera. The leaders’ summit gave the conference its political centre of gravity, and the speeches delivered there set the tone for the negotiations that followed.

The attendance of 68,544 registered participants, reported by AFP, makes COP31 one of the largest climate summits ever held, and the scale of the event has itself been part of the story. The opening was marred by organisational difficulties, with long queues and crowded halls reported in the first days, and the vast exhibition complex has been stretched to accommodate the crowds. But the size of the gathering also reflects the breadth of the climate movement, from the negotiators in the formal sessions to the businesses, cities and civil society groups in the pavilions and side events.

7.2 The United States Stays Away

The most conspicuous absence at COP31 is the United States. The world’s second-largest polluter after China is again not represented at the summit, a fact noted in almost every report from Antalya. The absence matters because the United States is central to any global climate deal: it is the largest historical emitter, the home of much of the world’s clean energy investment, and a major source of climate finance. Without it, the negotiations lose a key player, and the burden of leadership falls more heavily on the European Union, China and the other large emitters.

The reasons for the absence are political, and they are not expected to change before the summit ends. For the delegates in Antalya, the practical question is whether a deal can be reached without Washington, and whether the commitments made by others can compensate. The Antalya Statement and the buildings compact show that progress is possible without the United States. But the finance gap, and the stalled work programme, show the limits of that progress. A summit without the world’s second-largest emitter is a summit that must work harder to prove it matters.

8. What the Second Week Must Decide

COP31 runs until November 20, and the second week will decide whether the first week’s deals are the beginning of something larger or the high point of a summit that ran out of momentum. The agenda for the coming days is crowded, and the deadlines are tight.

8.1 The Draft Cover Decision

The most important document of the second week is the draft cover decision, which the presidency is expected to publish early next week after receiving written submissions from countries over the weekend. Australia, which is chairing the negotiations, has invited countries to submit their views by Saturday, and the draft that emerges will be the basis for the final days of bargaining. The draft will have to settle the questions that the reflections text left open: what the summit says about the 1.5 degree overshoot, what it says about fossil fuels, what it promises on finance, and what it does for the countries that have lost the most to climate change.

The negotiations over the cover decision will be the hardest of the summit. They require consensus among nearly 200 parties, and the divisions exposed in the first week, over finance, over fossil fuels, over the pace of change, will have to be bridged in a matter of days. The presidency has already faced procedural pushback, and the talks are expected to run late into the final nights. The history of climate summits suggests that the final text will not be agreed until the last hours, and possibly not until after the scheduled close.

8.2 The Questions That Remain

As the first week ends, the questions that remain are the ones that matter most. Will the new climate finance work programme be agreed, and will it close the gap between the 11.7 billion dollars pledged and the 305 billion dollars needed for adaptation alone? Will the cover decision commit countries to a faster move away from fossil fuels, or will it settle for language that changes nothing? Will the loss and damage fund, which holds about 600 million dollars in cumulative funding as of November 2026, receive the guidance and the money it needs to respond quickly when disasters strike? And will the deals of the first week, the carbon market statement, the buildings compact, the 10 billion dollar initiative launched by the development finance institutions of the United Kingdom, Norway and Canada, turn into real projects and real emissions cuts?

These are the questions the second week must answer. The delegates in Antalya have five more days to answer them. The coming days will provide the answers.

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