ANTALYA: Climate negotiators from almost 200 countries will spend the next two weeks at an annual United Nations (UN) summit under a dark cloud of waning ambition to tackle rapidly rising global temperatures.
The negotiating agenda at the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP31, starting Monday in the resort city of Antalya, Turkiye, is narrower than at any other major climate conference in the decade since the breakthrough Paris Agreement.
Yet two of the factors weighing on the proceedings – the conflict-fuelled energy crisis and an artificial intelligence (AI) backlash – offer potential to spur new action.
Some 60,000 diplomats, officials and advocates – alongside modest contingents of world leaders and business chiefs – are expected to participate in talks aimed at advancing emissions reductions, increasing flows of climate finance and boosting efforts to adapt to higher temperatures.
A signature push by the Turkish organisers aims to increase worldwide rates of electrification, an effort to curb greenhouse gas pollution by replacing fossil fuels in transportation, industry and heating.
It’s a diplomatic undertaking incommensurate with the bleak backdrop.
The UN warned last month that the world can no longer keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key threshold staked out by the Paris Agreement.
A series of climate-fuelled extreme weather events this year has underscored the risks that come with rising temperatures – including tens of thousands of deaths from lethal heat waves and wildfires across Europe and a devastating glacier collapse in Nepal.
Yet the wars in Iran and Ukraine that have strained international alliances and at times diverted funding from climate aid to defence spending have also revealed the financial toll of countries’ deep reliance on fossil fuels.
The pain from rising oil and gas prices has provided a catalyst to shift toward cleaner energy globally.
A Bloomberg index reflecting futures prices for oil and gas jumped about 67% in the 12 months to Friday, illustrating the hike in fuel costs since negotiators gathered a year ago for COP30 in Belem, Brazil.
“This year’s energy crisis has shocked us out of our complacency,” said Murat Kurum, Turkiye’s environment, urbanisation and climate change minister, who will act as president of COP31.
“Everyone now understands that energy that you must import is energy that you do not control.”
Laurence Tubiana, chief executive officer of the European Climate Foundation and one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, sees a potential pendulum swing at the Antalya talks after a series of meager outcomes at recent COP negotiations beset by US President Donald Trump’s loud disengagement from climate diplomacy.
The world had fewer options to counter past oil shocks, Tubiana told reporters last week.
But now, emissions-free energy technologies provide a “solution to escape from that volatility and have more solar and more energy security”.
This 31st session of the “conference of the parties” to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a smaller negotiating mandate – and less of an opening for the kind of blockbuster promises that have characterised recent sessions such as in Dubai in 2023, when nations pledged to transition away from fossil fuels.
Fewer major world leaders are set to join the talks, reflecting limited expectations.
Alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, attendees are expected to include UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb.
China’s Vice-President Han Zheng, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol are among other dignitaries slated to participate.
A large delegation of US congressional representatives, state governors and city mayors also is heading to Antalya.
The delegation aims to emphasise that even though Trump has withdrawn the country from the Paris Agreement and rolled back federal environmental regulations, the United States continues work to decarbonise in corporate boardrooms, cities and states.
Rising public scrutiny of the energy and environmental impacts of breakneck data center developments – a factor which offered a boost to some Democratic candidates in last week’s US midterm elections - is also providing a fresh impetus to green activism.
Even more than last year’s summit in Brazil, the focus is on delivering on existing promises, rather than setting ambitious new goals.
It’s “a bit of a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done COP”, said David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative.
“It’s not as flashy – but it is about getting the job done.”
For instance, negotiators will plot ways to translate into action a series of commitments from a global stocktake of progress that culminated at Dubai’s COP28 – including the goal to transition away from fossil fuels – and lay the groundwork for the next assessment which will unfold through 2028.
And after countries agreed on indicators for measuring progress toward an international target on climate adaptation, COP31 will aim to determine how to oversee that work and put it into practice.
Diplomats will also work on a mechanism that aims to better protect workers and communities being impacted by the energy transition.
Outside of formal negotiations that drive toward often hard-fought consensus agreements, nations also will be asked to back voluntary pledges, including a plan for AI firms to disclose environmental impact data, and for data centres to be powered by clean electricity. — Bloomberg
