What to Know About COP31

World leaders are flocking to the Mediterranean resort town of Antalya, Turkey, this weekend for the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP31. The U.S., of course, will once again not attend, as President Trump not only withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement but also from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the umbrella group that organizes the annual conferences. Still, 194 other governments will be there, putting their heads together on how to move another few inches toward a safer future.

This year, as with the last several convenings, the meeting arrives against a backdrop of geopolitical instability, worsening climate impacts, and growing concern about energy security and affordability. While conflicts like the Iran war in some ways bolster the case for the energy transition by surfacing the risks of fossil fuel dependence, prioritizing energy security can manifest as countries turning inward and showing less willingness to work for the global good.

Perhaps the biggest item on this year’s agenda is the “35x35” pledge, Turkey’s proposal to electrify 35% of the world’s final energy use by 2035, up from about 23% today. That would mean switching from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles and from burning fuels for heat to electric heat pumps. It would not necessarily mean generating all of the electricity to power those devices from clean sources, although countries have committed to triple renewable energy capacity during previous COPs. Turkey itself does not have a plan to phase out fossil fuels, and its use of coal and natural gas-fired power plants has been growing alongside renewables.

It’s not yet clear whether Turkey will encourage countries to sign onto the pledge outside of the main negotiations or try to get it into the final decision text of the conference. In a twist, the conference has two countries sharing the presidency this year, with Turkey playing host and overseeing the “action agenda” — the announcements, commitments, and dealmaking that happen outside the official negotiations — and its co-chair, Australia, mediating the formal talks.

In addition to the electrification goal, Turkey is also inviting countries to sign an artificial intelligence pledge declaring a “shared ambition to make AI part of the climate solution — sustainably powered, efficiently designed, transparently measured and available to all.” The pledge has no teeth, however, as it explicitly states that it creates “no new obligations” and notes that it should be implemented according to national priorities and circumstances.

Although there will be no big agreement like there was in Paris in 2015, the two weeks of talks will end, per usual, with a consensus document that summarizes the outcomes of the negotiations. The final text from last year’s conference in Belém, Brazil, set a new goal to triple finance for climate adaptation by 2035. Countries also agreed to create a “Just Transition Mechanism,” a program to help fossil fuel-based economies navigate the socioeconomic consequences of shifting to clean energy. But the final text at COP30 did not ultimately mention the creation of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, despite more than 80 countries supporting the idea, and didn’t, in fact, mention “fossil fuels” at all.

Much of the work this year will be about building on those outcomes. The climate adaptation finance goal, for example, is still fuzzy, as the parties did not agree on a baseline year from which to triple the funding, or define what types of finance count toward the goal, meaning it’s unclear what the actual target amount for 2035 is. The Just Transition Mechanism is similarly skeletal — negotiators will need to hammer out how to operationalize it into something useful. Countries are also supposed to make progress on the Global Goal on Adaptation, an as-yet ill-defined goal first established in the Paris Agreement that negotiators are still working out how to implement.

Then there’s the overarching theme of finance. As I’ve written in the past, every annual climate conference is ultimately a fight over money — specifically how much developed countries are sending to developing countries to help them fight climate change and respond to its effects.

To date, countries have agreed to mobilize $1.3 trillion annually in climate finance from all sources for developing countries by 2035, with $300 specifically coming from developed countries. Climate finance reached record levels in 2024, the most recent year with comprehensive data, with total global flows hitting $2 trillion and funding from developed to developing countries reaching $136.7 billion.

But progress is uneven. Only 2% of global investment in renewable energy over the past two decades went to Africa, said Brian Mukhaya, a senior manager on the Clean Air Task Force’s Africa team, during a recent media briefing. Finance challenges may also collide with the conference’s electrification goal. More than 550 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, Mukhaya said, and the continent will need seven to eight times current investment levels to achieve universal electricity access by 2030. Also, while the rising cost of capital is becoming an impediment to building clean energy projects everywhere in the world, the problem is acute in Africa, where the average cost of capital for power-sector investments is three to five times higher than in Europe and North America.

At COP31, negotiators will try to make progress on questions such as what form climate finance should take (grants, concessional loans, private finance, etc), how it can be more effectively distributed, and what it should be used for.

Another question hanging over this year’s conference is whether the final text will acknowledge the likelihood of surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, the more ambitious target laid out in the Paris Agreement. Last year’s decision text contained a tacit admission, with countries resolving to limit “the magnitude and duration of any temperature overshoot.” Doing so requires a more serious discussion of carbon removal strategies than delegates have engaged in to date.

With the world seemingly careening past the 1.5 degrees target, the annual climate talks have lost some of their luster. Critics increasingly call for a new approach. Ani Dasgupta, the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, for example, wants the COPs to center more on accountability and holding countries to their commitments. He also recommends developing a new decision-making process that does not allow a handful of countries to block decisions. Since the substance of the negotiations is becoming more and more about how to finance the transition, he argues the conference should also broaden its tent to bring in finance ministers and central banks.

“Where we are today is different from 1992 when COPs were set up,” he said during a recent press call. “The world is different. The broader needs are different. We are at a different place in the transition. And we actually haven't reformed the system.”