COP31 Opens in Antalya as Climate Finance Fight Erupts on Day One

An Opening Delayed by a Fight Over Money

ANTALYA — The COP31 climate talks opened in this Mediterranean resort city on Monday with a fight over money that delayed the opening ceremony by an hour and a half, as negotiators from nearly 200 countries wrestled with whether climate finance would even make it onto the official agenda. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders to "get serious" about tackling the climate crisis, warning that a year of devastating weather extremes had left patience running thin.

Thousands of delegates descended on the sprawling Antalya Expo Centre for the two-week conference, which runs until November 20 and is expected to draw around 100,000 participants. A World Leaders' Summit is scheduled for November 11 and 12, when heads of state and government will take the stage before the hard bargaining begins.

The opening hours set the tone. Negotiators had been locked in discussions late into Sunday night over demands from developing nations to include climate finance items on the agenda. According to a source familiar with the talks, a climate finance work programme will be included, but a separate agenda item on tripling adaptation finance — the money poorer nations need for sea walls, drought-resistant crops and flood defences — was not adopted as a standalone point. COP31 President Murat Kurum said its exclusion was "without prejudice" to discussions under other items.

Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, told the opening plenary that COP31 must be different by placing more emphasis on implementing commitments already made — breaking global targets and national plans into practical steps on adaptation finance, renewable energy, electrification and methane reduction.

The "Implementation COP" Under a Hard Backdrop

Turkey, which holds the COP31 presidency, has branded this gathering the "Implementation COP" — a summit judged not by new treaties but by whether existing promises finally turn into projects, power lines and payments. Australia's Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who leads the formal negotiations, warned that the world remains on course to exceed the Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold.

The backdrop could hardly be harder. The war between the United States and Iran has nations scrambling for oil cargoes and firing up coal plants, while the rapid rollout of artificial intelligence is pumping up power demand. The world's top historic greenhouse gas emitter, the United States, is shunning climate cooperation for a second year running after its exit from the Paris Agreement earlier this year — the first COP held since that withdrawal, which removes the largest historical emitter from finance conversations and sharpens developing countries' demand that Europe and others fill the gap.

Turkey's presidency has centred the summit on a goal to electrify more than a third of the global economy by 2035, up from around a fifth today. Under the "35 by 35" initiative, countries are being asked to pledge to raise electricity's share of global final energy consumption from about 23 percent to 35 percent by 2035. The broader Action Agenda also carries voluntary ambitions to cut energy use intensity in buildings by at least 25 percent, raise the global circular material use rate to at least 15 percent, and halve the projected increase in waste generation by 2035.

The scale of the negotiating task is formidable. Bowen said the conference faces more than 160 agenda items and 60 substantive negotiating mandates, covering the Just Transition Mechanism, the Mitigation Work Programme and the Global Goal on Adaptation.

Finance: The Numbers That Will Decide the Summit

Money is the fault line running through Antalya, and the figures explain why. Under the agreement reached at COP29 in Baku, developed countries are expected to take the lead in mobilising at least $300 billion annually for developing countries by 2035, alongside a broader ambition to scale up climate finance from all sources to $1.3 trillion a year.

Adaptation alone shows how wide the gap remains. The UN Environment Programme's 2026 Emissions Gap Report projects global warming of around 2.6 degrees Celsius this century even if countries fully implement their climate pledges — well above the Paris Agreement's temperature goals. The same report estimates that developing countries will need around $305 billion a year for climate adaptation by 2035, compared with international public adaptation finance of just $28.2 billion to $31.7 billion in 2024.

The toughest files have named co-chairs. India and Germany must decide on mitigation — how to press countries whose 2035 plans fall short of 1.5 degrees. France and the Philippines will work to build consensus on delivering existing finance commitments, while Britain and Sierra Leone must chart a credible path to tripling adaptation finance.

Developing countries, including India, have also pushed to include Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement — the clause that obligates developed countries to provide finance — in the provisional agenda. The principle at stake, known as common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, has been the spine of climate negotiations since 1992: those who emitted most historically should pay most now.

A Host Country Feeling the Heat Itself

For Turkey, the summit is personal as well as political. The host country suffered its worst drought in more than 50 years last year, with rainfall 27 percent below the long-term average — a pattern of extreme weather that has put adaptation at the centre of the Antalya agenda. Farmers in the cotton belt of western Turkey have watched acreage shrink by around 60 percent in some districts, and national seed cotton output is expected to fall 38 percent year-on-year to 1.2 million metric tons in 2026, according to the Turkish statistics institute.

Mehmet Kabak, a 59-year-old farmer who has grown cotton for decades on drought-prone land in Soke, told Reuters he cannot afford to keep making losses while countries argue over who should finance adaptation. Agriculture accounts for around 5 percent of Turkey's economic output but consumes 79 percent of the country's water, almost half of which is lost through inefficient infrastructure and irrigation, the government has said.

Turkey said in October that the amount set aside for land and water resources management would rise 40.5 percent, with 174 billion lira — about $3.5 billion — earmarked for agricultural irrigation investments.

What Success Looks Like in Antalya

COP31 is not expected to produce a landmark treaty text. The real fight, as negotiators privately concede, is over delivery: mobilising finance, measuring progress and accelerating the energy shift. The presidency is promoting a Climate Implementation Bridge, known as BRIDGE, aimed at preparing priority climate projects for investment and connecting them with potential financiers.

That framing carries a warning. Success in Antalya, as one veteran observer put it, should be measured not by pledges but by how much finance reaches the farm and the watershed. The farmers of Soke, the flood defences of Bangladesh and the power grids of sub-Saharan Africa will not be reading the final text — they will be waiting for the money it promises.

For now, the talks have two weeks. The leaders' summit on November 11 and 12 will test whether political will matches the rhetoric of the opening day — and the countries most exposed to a warming planet are watching every hour of it.