COP31 faces the hard part of meeting targets.  Plus, the World Bank identifies a ‘lifeline’ for low-income nations.

COP31 will come without a blockbuster deal to negotiate — and with an identity crisis.

After decades of making promises, can the COP process finally prove it can deliver?

Talking Turkey

What do you do with a giant annual climate summit once most of the giant climate promises have already been made? That’s the slightly awkward question hanging over the 31st U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP31, which kicks off in Antalya, Turkey, in three months.

For decades, COPs have been built around the drama of negotiating the next big target. Now comes the considerably less glamorous bit: actually delivering. “The system is experiencing growing pains because we’re moving from negotiating new targets to actually meeting them,” Joe Thwaites, international climate finance director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, tells my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz. “And we’re doing this against a backdrop of geopolitical rupture and an economic crisis.”

Last year’s COP30 in Belém, Brazil, offered a taste of how messy that transition could be. Brazil billed it as the “implementation COP,” only for the summit to descend into fights over the failure to phase out fossil fuel and a chaotic final plenary. One thing did gain momentum: the Action Agenda, where businesses, investors, cities, and NGOs try to turn all those lofty climate promises into things that actually happen.

Turkey is picking up that baton — and betting big on electrification. Its headline 35×35 push aims to raise electricity’s share of final energy demand from roughly 23% today to 35% by 2035. Australia, COP31’s first-ever cohost, is meanwhile focusing on access to finance, with Fiji and Tuvalu hosting the pre-COP and leaders segment, respectively, in the lead-up to Antalya.

And yes, we’re going to talk about climate finance again. Developing countries never loved the $300 billion-a-year target agreed at COP29, while rich countries have become conspicuously less enthusiastic about announcing shiny new multiyear pledges. “Governments no longer see these commitments as a point of diplomatic pride,” Thwaites says, “and quite likely, they’re seeing them as a domestic political liability.” Or, even more bluntly: “There’s no peer pressure, there’s no race to the top.”

So COP31 doesn’t have one enormous deal to land. Instead, it has something arguably harder to prove: that the world’s sprawling climate summit can evolve from a place where governments make promises into one where those promises actually go somewhere. And after 30 COPs, that may be the reckoning the process needs.

Going around gridlock

And Turkey has a plan for getting climate action moving when the big global negotiations don’t: Don’t wait for everyone to agree, Jesse writes.

Ahead of COP31, Turkey is exploring a new South-South and Triangular Cooperation Climate Initiative aimed particularly at least developed countries and small island developing states. The idea is to connect countries with practical expertise, technology, financing, and solutions that can help them actually deliver their climate plans.

And “actually deliver” is very much the theme of COP31. “COP31 presents a timely opportunity to demonstrate how South-South and triangular cooperation can drive climate implementation,” says Dima Al-Khatib, director of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation. “Beyond negotiations, we must strengthen platforms that connect countries with solutions, innovators with investors, and local experience with global partnerships.”

The proposal also fits neatly into Turkey’s broader attempt to make COP31 about implementation rather than another round of grand declarations. Abdullah Eren, the president of Turkish aid agency TİKA, wants a practical road map that can “transform ideas into concrete partnerships” and “deliver tangible outcomes for COP31.” In other words: fewer promises, more things that might actually get done.

There’s another attraction. With wealthy countries increasingly reluctant to make big new climate finance pledges, a south-south mechanism wouldn’t need everyone on board. A smaller coalition of willing countries could simply get moving — much like COP’s increasingly important Action Agenda, which allows governments, businesses, investors, cities, and civil society to pursue climate initiatives outside the painfully slow consensus negotiations.

But there’s a catch. For now, this is still an idea, not a new pot of climate cash. Organizers haven’t yet settled what it would fund, how it would be governed, or how it would fit alongside existing initiatives. And because it sits outside the formal negotiating process, it won’t be binding or appear in a COP decision. That’s the trade-off: It may be easier to get moving precisely because nobody has to agree.

Read more on:

• Could COP31 be the end of negotiations? 
• Turkey bets on south-south cooperation ahead of COP31
• AI is a ‘lifeline’ for low-income countries, World Bank says