Antalya COP31: From Pledges to Action
Sudheer Kumar Shukla and Olivia Karp
New Delhi, Nov 7 (UNI) At the time when COP31 starts on November 9, the science indicates that the 1.5 degree C limit will be surpassed. The problems we now have to deal with are who is to pay for adaptation, who is to lead the move away from fossil fuels, and who is to draw up the rules on carbon and trade.
Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the world is confronted with an unpleasant reality at COP31 in Antalya (from 9 to 20 November). The UN Environment Program's Emissions Gap Report 2026, released on 21 October, indicates that the 1.5 deg C target with "no or limited" overshoot has now been missed. The most ambitious pathway still open-a "lowest possible overshoot" scenario which would bring warming down to 1.5 deg C by 2100, even though this would only occur with about a 50 per cent chance-would call for global emissions to fall by 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent by 2035 and 69 per cent by 2040, all when compared to 2025 levels.
Full implementation of the national pledges currently in force would reduce emissions by 5 to 8 per cent by 2030 and 11 to 15 per cent by 2035. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out, the emissions gap has now turned into a leadership gap.
The UN again reached the same conclusion in its 2026 NDC Synthesis Report, which was issued on October 27. This report examines 127 new climate plans submitted by 154 parties and states that emissions in 2035 would be 6 per cent below those in 2019, or 9 per cent if the conditional commitments are also met. Taking into account the long-term net-zero targets, the report estimates that the warming by 2100 will be in the range of 1.7-2.3 deg C.
Antalya is the first Conference of the Parties to have the presidency and the negotiations jointly undertaken by two countries, Turkey acting as the host nation and assuming the role of chair, while Chris Bowen from Australia serves as President of the Negotiations and has exclusive authority with regard to the negotiating agenda and the draft texts, together with a pre-COP meeting which took place in October in the Pacific region in Fiji. This arrangement ensures that the interests of small island states remain central to the discussions. At the same time, the world's second-largest emitter is withdrawing. The United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement on January 27, 2026, and its exit from the United Nations climate convention will come into effect in February 2027.
What Antalya will receive from Belém is unfinished work. Although COP30 agreed to "at least triple" adaptation finance by 2035, it did not set a baseline or assign specific donors. The meeting recognized the Baku-to-Belém roadmap, which aims at USD 1.3 trillion per year of climate finance, but the final document left out an explicit fossil-fuel roadmap.
When the negotiators met in Bonn in June, the Global Goal on Adaptation was closed under Rule 16, which meant that there was no formal outcome, and the efforts of developing countries to put unilateral trade measures on the agenda were abandoned and placed within the just-transition track. COP31 will be evaluated on the basis of whether it settles these issues or repeats them.
As for adaptation funding, the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2025 indicates that by 2035 developing countries will require an annual amount ranging from USD 310 billion to USD 365 billion, while in 2023 international public finance amounted to about USD 26 billion.
At the Belém dialogue, India's Environment Minister, Bhupender Yadav, stated that adaptation finance should consist of grants and not of debt-creating instruments and cautioned that the Glasgow target of doubling public adaptation finance to approximately USD 40 billion by 2025 will most likely be missed. He is right on both issues. Antalya should set a baseline, draw up an implementation schedule, and clarify what is meant by a grant-equivalent; otherwise, the 59 Belém adaptation indicators will offer, with admirable accuracy, a measure of how much the world has fallen short.
Secondly, the move away from fossil fuels. At Belém, more than 80 countries backed a roadmap; it was only the COP28 "UAE Consensus" that represented the actual decision.
Brazil's presidency pledged to draw up an informal roadmap to submit at COP31, and in April 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, in order to build up momentum outside the formal process. The Belém reports noted that India was one of the countries that wanted explicit fossil-fuel language excluded. India's objections are by no means trivial since per capita emissions are still low, hundreds of millions of people still require affordable energy, and a transition without finance would pass the burden onto people in low-income countries. Yet a position based merely on what India is unwilling to accept is weak.
A better approach would be a transition framework that takes into account the different stages of development, is linked to finance and technology, and clearly states the kind of support that allows for a faster phase-down.
Thirdly, there is the matter of trade. The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism started its payment phase on 1 January 2026. The Global Trade Research Initiative thinks that Indian exporters of steel and aluminum will have to lower their prices by 15 to 22 percent in order to meet the charge, since around one-fifth of their exports are destined for that market. At the meeting in Bonn, the developing countries were unable to get a separate agenda item for unilateral measures, and the EU also rejected one. Just protesting won't achieve this. India is in a better position than most other countries to shift the emphasis from expressing complaints to coming up with solutions; for example, by counting the carbon prices paid domestically, including those from India's own Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, as part of the border charges, and by treating financing for decarbonization in export industries as part of the climate finance accounting.
India made its 2035 commitment in April 2026, aiming to reduce the emission intensity of its GDP by 47 per cent compared to 2005 levels, have 60 per cent of its power capacity from non-fossil sources, and achieve an additional carbon sink of 3.5 to 4.0 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. By February 2026, non-fossil capacity had already reached 52.57 per cent, meeting the 2030 target five years earlier than planned. This result is real and allows New Delhi to ask richer countries to honour their promises.
Even though independent analysts have noted that the targets for emission intensity and installed capacity are likely to be achieved under the current policies and that this by itself does not guarantee actual reductions in emissions, India's case will be stronger if it links its request for finance with greater transparency-specifically by providing absolute emission pathways and clean-power figures based on generation rather than just on capacity.
In Antalya, the programme includes one day devoted to 'Zero Waste,' and the summit starts with this topic on November 11. It must not be seen simply as a ceremonial event. As UNEP states, methane levels must fall by at least 25 per cent by 2035 and by 40 per cent by 2040 compared with 2025 levels, and decomposing waste in landfills and dumps is one of the cheapest ways to address the problem. Waste also links mitigation with adaptation and equity, since it affects public health, urban flooding, informal livelihoods, and municipal budgets. India has set up extended producer responsibility systems covering plastic packaging, e-waste, batteries, and used tires.
This market-based, polluter-pays approach is being followed by other developing economies. Zero Waste Day should move from pledges to implementing financed programs that capture methane from waste and build circular economy systems linked to EPR, with India offering practical experience rather than just speeches.
The UNEP report, while asserting that overshoot is unavoidable, does also identify a source of hope. It mentions 63 structural policy measures-including investments in renewable energy and the introduction of carbon pricing-that have actually resulted in real-world reductions in emissions.
In the electricity sector, policies led to an average emission reduction of 9 per cent, and carbon taxes and trading schemes achieved reductions ranging from 5 to 13 per cent. Even though the path back to 1.5 deg C is narrow, it does involve policies which are already known to be effective. What is missing, though, is the political will to expand implementation and the financial resources needed to allow developing countries to do so.
At the pre-COP meeting in Fiji, Minister Yadav said that Antalya should be evaluated in terms of whether implementation speeds up, whether support reaches those in need and whether proven solutions are expanded, rather than on the basis of new declarations. That sounds like a reasonable standard; it should apply to Australia and Türkiye as host countries, to the EU on trade, to richer countries on their financial contributions, and to India on its own transparency and ambition.
Should Antalya pass this test, COP31 might be remembered as the conference which turned a decade of pledges into real deliveries; if it fails the test, it will be remembered as the one which knew the figures but failed to act on them.
(Dr Sudheer Kumar Shukla is a US-based senior expert in climate policy, and
Olivia Karp is the Founder of the Mobility for Climate Policy Research Institute (MCPRI) and a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo. The views are personal.)
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