COP31 Opens in Antalya With Implementation and Climate Finance at the Top of the Agenda

The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP31, opened in Antalya, Turkiye, on Monday, November 9, 2026. Negotiators from nearly 200 countries face two weeks of discussions on accelerating the energy transition and providing funds to help developing nations cope with the climate emergency, AFP reported.

The conference runs from November 9 to November 20 at the Antalya Expo Center. A venue of 1.1 million square metres has been prepared for the summit, according to Anadolu. Turkiye is presiding over COP31, and Turkish Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Minister Murat Kurum is serving as conference president. Australian Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is leading the negotiations, under an unusual arrangement that settled a dispute over who would host the conference.

An implementation summit

The partners have branded the summit the implementation COP, focused on turning commitments into concrete action. The conference is organised under the theme COP of the Future, COP of Implementation, built around three pillars: dialogue, consensus, and action, Anadolu reported.

Turkiye is promoting an action agenda alongside the formal negotiations. Its centrepiece is an electrification drive to raise the share of global energy demand met by electricity from around 20 percent today to 35 percent by 2035. The European Union has called for clean electrification, a term that could spark debate over the role of fossil fuels in the Turkish proposal, AFP reported.

Day 1 of the conference focuses on food, agriculture and health, highlighting how rising temperatures and changing weather patterns affect food production, water resources and wellbeing.

Money, and an empty chair

Finance runs through the talks. Developing nations want funds to cope with the climate emergency, and the pressure to deliver has grown since the United Nations warned in September that global temperatures were on course to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, breaching the most ambitious threshold set by the Paris Agreement.

The United States is absent from the summit as an official party delegation. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement and has not sent officials to COP31. A United States congressional delegation of Democrats will come to Antalya, according to the AFP report.

Rachel Cleetus, climate programme director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said before the talks: "Global leaders must pull us back from the brink and commit to rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels and expanding renewable energy, an imperative reinforced by the current energy affordability crisis." Yalchin Rafiyev, the Azerbaijan chief negotiator, told AFP "the mood is very good".

Attendance figures are expectations, not counts. AFP reported that more than 100,000 people are expected to attend over the two weeks. Le Monde put the expected attendance at around 60,000.

What happens next

The World Leaders Summit is scheduled for November 11 and 12, midway through the first week. No agreement or negotiating outcome exists yet. This is an opening day story: the arguments over finance, electrification and fossil fuels will be settled, or left unsettled, in the text negotiators produce before the conference closes on November 20. An earlier Orbit Post report set out the Himalayan climate agenda that Nepal and Bhutan brought into this summit season.