COP31 will meet in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to 20, 2026. It will debate finance, electrification, resilience and earlier unmet promises — and it will almost certainly produce the one result everyone inside the process can rely on: there will be a COP32.
Thirty Years After Geneva
Roger Bate attended COP2 in Geneva in July 1996, when Angela Merkel opened a comparatively small meeting preparing the ground for the Kyoto Protocol. His concern then was not that climate could not change, but that political institutions were turning evolving science into a mandate for preferred policies while treating policy disagreement as scientific denial.
Three decades later, the negotiating forum has become a travelling professional ecosystem spanning governments, international bodies, campaign groups, consultants, academics, businesses and journalists. Its growth is not evidence that its central mission has been achieved: emissions have continued to rise, promised finance has disappointed poorer countries and the gap between declarations and delivery remains wide.
From Negotiation to Permanent Implementation
Türkiye’s presidency has announced a “35 by 35” goal to raise electricity’s share of final energy demand from just over 20 percent to 35 percent by 2035, alongside waste reduction and urban resilience. These are practical priorities. But an “implementation COP” can expand almost without limit through road maps, dialogues, pilot programmes, investor platforms, technical assistance and voluntary coalitions.
That shift makes activity easier to present as progress even when emissions do not fall. The wider the Action Agenda becomes, the larger the constituency with a professional interest in another summit. COP31 need not deliver one decisive agreement; it needs enough movement and enough unfinished work to justify reconvening.
Polarization Helps the Process
Republicans who deny that the climate is changing or that greenhouse gases matter are wrong. They are on firmer ground when they doubt that rich-country consumption restrictions and another declaration will determine the global emissions path. The practical alternatives they emphasize — nuclear power, innovation, infrastructure and adaptation — deserve serious attention.
The climate left is right about anthropogenic warming but often understates the limits of international coordination, the engineering constraints on intermittent power and the role of growth and private experimentation. Each camp supplies the other with a caricature, allowing criticism of COP to be dismissed as denial and policy overreach to discredit even sensible action. Meanwhile, the institutions between them continue to convene and expand.
What a Serious Climate Policy Would Emphasize
A more serious policy would begin with humility about diplomacy. It would put nuclear power at the centre of reliable low-carbon generation, place adaptation alongside mitigation, encourage competing technologies rather than prescribe one distant mix, and preserve price signals so that fire, flood, wind and coastal risks do not disappear behind politically convenient subsidies.
- Expand firm, low-carbon nuclear generation rather than treating it as optional.
- Invest in flood defences, heat-resilient cities, water systems, strong buildings and public infrastructure.
- Support experimentation in storage, geothermal energy, carbon removal, transmission and resilient crops.
- Make risk and public subsidies visible so adaptation decisions remain accountable.
Climate and Health
Climate-and-health analysis should count all effects rather than select only those that support a predetermined policy. Extreme heat creates real and growing risks, yet major multicountry studies currently attribute substantially more temperature-associated mortality to cold than to heat. That comparison needs care: “cold-related” is a statistical estimate extending beyond freezing weather, and today’s ratio does not prove that future warming will deliver a net health benefit. Aging, urbanization, housing, energy affordability and adaptation can change both sides.
Energy access is itself a health intervention. WHO estimates that 2.1 billion people still cook with open fires or inefficient stoves and attributes about 2.9 million premature deaths each year to household air pollution. Nearly one billion people rely on health facilities with no electricity or unreliable supply. Policies that raise the cost of reliable power or transitional fuels without an equally dependable substitute can prolong measured harm, even when adopted in the name of climate and health.
Malaria also resists simple climatic explanations. Temperature affects transmission, but so do rainfall, housing, land use, treatment, vector control, conflict and public-health capacity. Between 2000 and 2015, interventions averted an estimated 663 million malaria cases in endemic Africa, with insecticide-treated nets accounting for 68 percent. Climate changes the terrain; it does not dictate the outcome.
When Climate Risk Is Socialized
Insurers have good reasons to model rare, costly events, but their market judgment is less revealing when extreme losses move to governments, taxpayers or unrelated policyholders. The United States’ flood programme, Florida’s public reinsurance and insurer of last resort, France’s Cat Nat system and Australia’s cyclone pool all place public mechanisms behind risks that private markets will not fully carry.
Public backstops may be defensible, but they should not be mistaken for private firms bearing the full consequences of their climate assessments. Subsidies should be visible, premiums should reflect risk where possible and assistance should be deliberate. Otherwise policy can encourage development in hazardous places and later attribute losses solely to climate change.
The Summit’s Real Measure of Success
No annual conference controls the entire emissions trajectory, and sovereign states will not surrender development easily. But if COP lacks the authority and agreement needed to deliver its central objective, institutional growth cannot stand in for effectiveness. It should identify outcomes that would not otherwise have occurred, disclose their cost and stop programmes that fail.
COP31 may produce useful bilateral deals and technical exchanges. The harder question is whether those gains justify a permanent global spectacle whose strongest sanction for weak implementation is a larger implementation apparatus. The likely result is managed disappointment: enough activity to claim momentum, enough failure to preserve urgency and enough unfinished conflict to guarantee the next summit.
Bottom Line
Climate change is real, and international cooperation can help address it. But after thirty-one conferences, continuation is a more reliable output than measurable results. Failure is not fatal to this institution. Finality would be.
