COP31 in Antalya: a climate summit with two captains

The 2026 United Nations climate summit, COP31, will be held in Antalya, Türkiye, in late 2026, under an arrangement without precedent in the history of the climate negotiations. Türkiye will host the conference and hold the COP presidency, while Australia will lead the negotiations as President of Negotiations, managing draft texts and guiding decision-making. A pre-COP meeting was held in a Pacific island country, honouring Australia's original bid to co-host the summit with Pacific island nations and to foreground the concerns of the world's most climate-vulnerable states.

The split presidency was the product of a diplomatic impasse. Australia announced its intention to host COP31 in 2022, proposing a Pacific co-hosting arrangement that would have made it the first United Nations climate summit held physically in Oceania. Türkiye also bid to host. The standoff persisted through the final week of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in 2025, and risked pushing the 2026 meeting to Bonn, Germany, where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat is based, with no agreed president. The compromise, struck at COP30, gave Türkiye the venue and Australia the negotiating gavel, with Australian Climate Minister Chris Bowen describing the outcome as preserving a leadership role even without the venue.

The substance awaiting Antalya was set at COP30. Countries agreed to mobilise 1.3 trillion dollars annually by 2035 for climate action, to double adaptation finance by 2025 and triple it by 2035, to launch a Global Implementation Accelerator and the Belém Mission to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and to operationalise the loss and damage fund. But more than 80 countries' push for explicit fossil-fuel phase-out language failed: the final text only referenced the COP28 UAE Consensus language of transitioning away from fossil fuels, and a draft roadmap was removed in the final hours. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that overshooting 1.5 degrees remained a real risk without deep, rapid emissions cuts.

Expectations for COP31 are deliberately modest. Analysts at the World Resources Institute noted that this year's summit is not expected to be defined by a landmark negotiated outcome; the focus is on overcoming practical barriers, backing pledges with finance and policy, and advancing the COP presidency's goal of meeting 35 per cent of energy needs with electricity by 2035. The ocean is a priority of the Action Agenda, and Pacific leaders at the pre-COP called for a stronger role for ocean solutions. Whether the ocean becomes a formal outcome or remains a theme, and whether the split presidency functions smoothly, will be the summit's real tests.