BEGINNING on Monday, Nov. 9, and continuing through Friday, Nov. 20, representatives from around the world will gather in Antalya, Turkey, for the 31st Conference of the Parties (COP31) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Although it is an annual event, this year’s climate summit seems to have taken on somewhat more significance than those of the past several years, for a number of reasons. Consequently, the organizers of COP31 have developed an extremely ambitious agenda for the two-week conference, inspiring a great deal of hope for progress, but curbing expectations that any would actually be made.
COP31 is taking place this year under the shadow of the ongoing war in the Middle East, and coincides with the presence of one of the strongest El Niño events in recorded history, with all that it implies for serious climactic impacts around the globe. It also comes on the heels of a determination by multiple UN agencies and other authorities that the world would definitely overshoot the 1.5-degree-Celsius global warming threshold, which raises uncomfortable questions about the legacy of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Coincidentally, COP31 also marks the 10th anniversary of that agreement’s entering into force.
It also follows the apparent political earthquake in the United States, where the ruling party of President Donald Trump was decisively defeated, handing control of both houses of the US Congress and 30 of the 50 US states to the opposition Democratic Party. The US, of course, is not officially participating in COP31, with Trump having formally removed the world’s current second-largest and historically biggest emitter of climate-destroying greenhouse gases from the Paris Agreement at the beginning of this year. However, some members of Congress, including several of the newly elected representatives and senators, and a number of US businesses will be in attendance.
The president of COP31 is Murat Kurum, who is the minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change in Turkey, and in the run-up to the event he has lobbied aggressively for adoption of what he calls an “Action Agenda,” with a goal of moving beyond climate pledges to the concrete implementation of existing commitments. The Action Agenda is organized around 10 themes, including the clean energy transition and electrification, zero waste and methane reduction, and climate-resilient cities. The COP31 presidency has also put forward voluntary pledges, including a “35-by-35 pledge” aimed at increasing electricity’s global share of total final energy consumption to 35 percent by 2035 (it is currently 23 percent), as well as commitments from governments, corporations and investors to make artificial intelligence (AI) more sustainable in it resource use and environmental impact.
Contentious issues
However, that agenda is going to have to compete for attention with the “formal” agenda for COP31. The issues on that agenda are contentious, and include climate finance, which will probably be the most difficult subject for delegates to agree upon; reductions in fossil fuel use and greater emissions reductions in general, including operationalizing methane-reduction pledges agreed five years at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland; and funding for loss and damage in countries that have contributed the least to climate change.
With so many ambitions on the table, and none of them particularly easy to address to the satisfaction of everyone with a stake in the matter, it is difficult to see where much progress can actually be made. There are also bigger obstacles to progress than just differing national intentions. One major issue is the delay in science-based reporting, which has been criticized for handicapping governments’ abilities to form effective climate policies. The second global stocktake, an assessment of progress toward meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals, will begin at COP31, but the scientific process that underpins it is delayed, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has failed to reach agreement on when it will finalize the next set of working-group reports. As things now stand, the preliminary scientific information won’t be available before 2028, and may be delayed even further.
In addition, political shifts around the world suggest that many representatives will be inclined to take a “wait-and-see” attitude, and be cautious about making firm commitments. No one knows what the implications of the US shift in power would be. Likewise, recent electoral gains by right-wing parties across Europe could see climate policies falling out of favor and new limits placed on climate-related action.
