COP31 opens Monday with the hardest question still unresolved

World leaders and negotiators arrive in Antalya for COP31 from November 9 to 20, carrying familiar promises into a year marked by destructive heat, floods, storms and energy insecurity. The summit's hardest problem is no longer identifying solutions. It is deciding who moves first, how quickly and who pays when governments fall behind.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres is treating the meeting as a final major climate push before his term ends. In an interview with the Associated Press, he described the negotiations as a moment when countries can no longer keep shifting responsibility to someone else.

Three fights to watch

The first is the speed of emissions cuts. Governments broadly agree that clean power, efficiency and electrification must expand, but national plans still do not collectively match the scale of warming risks described by scientists. Negotiators will be judged on measurable implementation rather than another carefully worded declaration.

The second is money. Developing countries need financing for clean infrastructure and for adapting to heat, drought, storms and rising seas. They also argue that communities suffering losses from climate change often contributed the least to the accumulated emissions driving it. Guterres has again argued that extraordinary fossil-fuel profits should help support countries facing the most severe damage.

The third is trust. Energy-price shocks and geopolitical conflict have made governments more protective of domestic supplies. That can accelerate renewable investment in some places while extending fossil-fuel use in others. COP31 has to reconcile immediate energy security with long-term climate goals without pretending the tension does not exist.

What happened to 1.5°C?

The Paris Agreement's ambition of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels remains the central reference point. But Guterres told AP that scientists had warned him the threshold could no longer honestly be described as safely within reach without an overshoot.

That does not make every fraction of a degree irrelevant. The opposite is true: smaller increases reduce exposure to extreme heat, crop failures, flooding and ecosystem loss. The summit's task is to prevent a difficult target from becoming an excuse for slower action.

COP meetings often produce a blur of speeches, pledges and late-night drafting. The useful test in Antalya will be simpler: do countries leave with stronger near-term plans, credible financing and deadlines that can be checked? If not, the hardest question will remain waiting at COP32 — only under hotter conditions.