COP31 opens Monday in Antalya, Turkey, bringing together delegates and world leaders from nearly 200 countries. While the United States will be absent, the summit aims to produce tangible outcomes that are visibly real, beginning with speeches from world leaders and a subsequent examination of past climate pledges.
The talks occur as the planet faces unprecedented human-caused global heating and global temperatures are set to breach a key threshold. The United Nations has warned that the world is all but certain to blitz past the target of limiting planetary warming to 1.5C. This urgency is amplified by the strongest El Niño weather system on record, supercharged by fossil fuels, which is expected to cause trillions of dollars in damage and take hundreds of thousands of lives.
Negotiators face immense pressure from ongoing droughts, floods, and extreme heat, while operating against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions, an energy crisis, war, and the influence of artificial intelligence and the Trump era. The primary objective is to remove obstacles slowing decarbonization and move beyond pledges toward concrete action.
These efforts follow previous debates over the nature of climate negotiations, such as those ahead of the 2025 summit in Belém, Brazil. In that instance, Brazilian hosts argued that concrete national plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions—the bedrock of the Paris agreement—were the business of national governments rather than subjects for negotiation, leading to concerns among some global south negotiators that there would be nothing to negotiate.