ANTALYA, Türkiye — Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate change executive secretary, opened COP31 on Monday by urging delegates to spend less time setting targets and more time delivering on them — to “supercharge solutions,” as he put it.
Türkiye is this year’s host. Its environment minister, Murat Kurum, holds the COP31 presidency, and the talks themselves will be run by Australia’s Chris Bowen — a two-country partnership Stiell described as unique. The conference runs through Nov. 20.
Past climate conferences sent signal after signal to political systems and markets, Stiell said, and the signals worked. He said 90% of large renewable projects are now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives, and adaptation has moved from the margins to the mainstream. But progress, he said, is “nowhere near far enough or fair enough.”
2026 on course to be among the four hottest years
Day one in Antalya also brought new science. The World Meteorological Organization timed the release of its State of the Climate Update 2026 to the conference’s opening. The agency counted the past 12 years as the 12 warmest on record. The past four, this year included, are the warmest of the lot. Put a number on it: across January to September, the planet’s surface averaged roughly 1.47 degrees Celsius warmer than before the industrial era.
António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, summed it up in a statement released alongside the report: records are falling, costs are rising, and it is the people who did least to cause the crisis who suffer first and worst. His message to leaders was direct: “get serious by cutting emissions faster.” He also called for a quicker just transition away from fossil fuels and for vulnerable countries to get the finance and protection they need.
Celeste Saulo, who heads the WMO, called this El Niño unlike any the agency has tracked before. It could peak, she said, at close to four times the level that defines an El Niño, sometime between November 2026 and January 2027. Ocean heat has set a record for the tenth year running. The sea itself is at its highest level since records began — bad news for the 900 million people who live along low-lying coasts. Nepal gets a mention, for the worst of reasons. In late August a Himalayan glacier collapse triggered flash floods downstream that left more than 1,300 people dead.
The money question
Stiell said COP31 must break existing global targets and national plans into component steps. The money needs sorting out. Stiell wants negotiators to spell out how the $300 billion and $1.3 trillion promised in earlier rounds will actually be paid, without unpicking the deals themselves — and to make good on last year’s agreement to triple adaptation finance. Tripling the world’s renewable energy capacity by 2030 remains on the table; Stiell came back to that target too. Cut methane and electrify more of the economy, he argued, and the two together act like a “planetary icepack” — enough, on his numbers, to trim half a degree off where global heating is headed.
For Kurum, this is the implementation COP. He named three guiding principles: dialogue, consensus and action. His government’s 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge would lift electricity to 35% of final energy use by 2035. What Antalya decides, Kurum argued, should be felt by ordinary people — in cheaper energy bills, in cities better able to withstand disasters, and on farms that can keep producing food.
Bowen, the Australian minister who will chair the search for consensus, was candid about the science: on current trends, the world overshoots 1.5 degrees Celsius. “But we can still return if we work together and act with urgency, solidarity and resolve,” he said.
Stiell closed his opening remarks with a caution. “No COP is a silver bullet,” he said. “No single conference can bridge the chasm between the science and reality. Every recent COP has delivered strides forward. This one must too.”
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