COP31 climate summit opens in Turkey with warnings on finance and rising heat

The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference opened Monday in this Mediterranean resort city, with Turkish and Australian officials jointly presiding over a summit meant to turn a decade of climate pledges into measurable action, even as new data showed the planet heading toward one of its hottest years on record.

COP31 runs through November 20 at the Antalya Expo Center, a former horticultural fairground on the city's edge converted into a sprawling negotiating campus. Türkiye's Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change says it secured the presidency at last year's COP30 in Belém, Brazil, under an unusual split arrangement: Türkiye hosts the conference and holds the ceremonial presidency through Environment Minister Murat Kurum, while Australia leads the formal negotiations through Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Organizers said roughly 85 heads of state and government had confirmed plans to attend, according to remarks Kurum gave ahead of the summit, along with nearly 300 ministers and delegations occupying 159 approved pavilions and 90 delegation offices.

A split presidency with a crowded agenda

Negotiators settled a dispute over the conference agenda in weekend talks, averting a procedural fight at Monday's opening, according to a day-one account from the specialist outlet Climate Home News. African delegations had pushed for a standalone agenda item on adaptation finance and trade; that request was shelved after late-night consultations in favor of folding the issue into existing negotiating strands. Nepal's bid for a formal item on mountain ecosystems was similarly redirected into ongoing consultations rather than added to the formal agenda. Bowen, who chairs the negotiations, said delegates face more than 160 agenda items and roughly 60 substantive negotiating mandates over the two weeks, and promised the eventual cover decision would be narrow rather than sweeping. "There will be no surprises," he said, describing the goal as a focused, practical text rather than a lengthy political declaration.

Kurum framed Türkiye's presidency around three words — "Dialogue. Consensus. Action." — and said he wants COP31 remembered as an "Implementation COP" that produces tangible results in food security, energy access, health and cities, according to his opening-day remarks reported by Daily Sabah. Türkiye is also pushing a voluntary "35 by 35" initiative meant to lift electricity's share of global final energy consumption from roughly a fifth today to about 35 percent by 2035, alongside a project-preparation platform it calls the Climate Implementation Bridge, intended to help developing countries line up bankable clean-energy and adaptation projects for investors.

A warming backdrop and an unresolved finance fight

The opening coincided with a fresh scientific warning. In a briefing to UN member states ahead of the summit, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said recent months had been the hottest on record for their time of year, with sea-surface temperatures at their highest since measurements began, and that the WMO's updated State of the Climate assessment — released to coincide with COP31 — would show 2026 ranking among the four warmest years on record. The agency has also forecast a very strong El Niño event with near-certainty of persisting through the Antalya talks and into February 2027, a pattern that typically adds extra warmth on top of the underlying trend from greenhouse-gas emissions.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell told delegates that the pace of global action remains inadequate a decade after the Paris Agreement was signed. He called for tripling global adaptation finance, easing poorer countries' access to climate funds, tripling renewable-energy capacity and cutting methane emissions from oil, gas and waste — measures he described as a "planetary icepack" that could shave roughly half a degree off projected warming if pursued aggressively.

"Progress is nowhere near fast or fair enough," Stiell said, adding that "no COP is a silver bullet" for the scale of change required.

The money question that dogged last year's Belém summit remains unresolved. Under a finance goal adopted at COP29 in Baku, developed countries are expected to lead efforts to mobilize at least $300 billion annually for developing nations by 2035, within a broader ambition — the so-called Baku-to-Belém roadmap — of marshaling $1.3 trillion a year from all sources by the same date. A coalition of twenty ministers calling itself the High Ambition Coalition pledged Monday to keep the Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree Celsius target "within reach," though several governments acknowledged falling short of their own commitments; Germany's climate envoy told delegates that Berlin's 2025 climate-finance contribution of roughly 4.7 billion euros missed its 6 billion euro target, citing domestic budget pressure.

Vulnerable nations press their case as major powers send mixed signals

Small island and low-lying states used the opening day to warn against backsliding. A minister from the Marshall Islands, speaking for the High Ambition Coalition, said any temporary overshoot of the 1.5-degree threshold — now considered all but unavoidable by UN scientists — must not become an excuse to ease pressure on emissions cuts. Pacific nations and African and least-developed countries are expected to press hardest in the coming two weeks on adaptation funding and on reviving language, dropped from last year's Belém text, calling for a roadmap away from fossil fuels; that fight was pushed outside the formal UN process last year into a voluntary coalition led by Colombia, which plans to hand off further work on the issue at a side event in Antalya before a follow-up conference in Tuvalu in 2027.

Washington's traditional role as a dominant voice at UN climate talks continues to recede. No high-level United States delegation is attending COP31, extending a pattern set at last year's COP30, when the Trump administration sent no official delegation for the first time since the UN climate process began in 1995 following the country's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. China, by contrast, is sending its second-ranking official. China's Foreign Ministry announced that Vice President Han Zheng will travel to Türkiye between November 6 and 12 as President Xi Jinping's special representative to attend the Antalya Leaders' Summit, with a stop in Georgia on the same trip.

What comes next

The World Leaders' Summit, the portion of COP31 drawing heads of state and government, is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, after which technical negotiators will spend a second week working through the finance, adaptation and just-transition disputes left unresolved on opening day. A separate, long-running fight over the timeline for the next major scientific assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change remains deadlocked — European countries, small island states and the least-developed nations want the report finished before a 2028 global stocktake of climate progress, while India, Saudi Arabia and Russia favor a later date — and is due to resume in virtual talks on December 1. Kurum and Bowen have said they intend to close the conference on November 20 with a presidency-led decision rather than the sort of marathon, last-minute text that nearly derailed last year's summit in Belém.