As delegates gather in Antalya for the 31st United Nations climate conference, they will meet under a verdict unthinkable in Paris a decade ago. The U.N. Environment Programme’s latest Emissions Gap Report, pointedly subtitled "The Point of Return,” concludes that a temporary overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit can no longer be avoided. COP31 therefore faces a narrower and harder question than its predecessors. The task is no longer to keep warming below a line, but to manage the consequences of crossing it: who pays, how the damage is counted and who will be held to account.

We are no longer arguing about whether to cross the line. We are arguing about who will pay the price of crossing.

Arithmetic is unforgiving

Global greenhouse gas emissions reached an estimated 58.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent in 2025. Even the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s most optimistic pathway, under which warming peaks at 1.7-1.8 degrees Celsius around midcentury before falling back to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, requires emissions to decline by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, relative to 2025 levels. With the U.S. outside the Paris Agreement and several major emitters submitting stagnant national plans, these figures measure the distance to the target rather than progress toward it.

The same pathway also assumes the removal and permanent storage of roughly 320 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide this century, equivalent to about eight years of current global carbon emissions. Direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture and enhanced rock weathering are nowhere near achieving that scale, and all are costly and energy-intensive.

Losses incurred above 1.5 degrees Celsius, such as the destruction of warm-water reefs and the submergence of islands, cannot be reversed even if temperatures fall. The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Health Check finds that seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been breached, the latest being ocean acidification, a direct result of the seas absorbing roughly 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans. The Amazon has lost about 15% of its original primary forest, including 32.2 million acres between 2022 and 2025, weakening the "flying rivers” of transpired moisture on which South American rainfall and agriculture depend. Observations point to a marked weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, estimated by some studies to have declined by around 14% over three decades. Models of its collapse project severe winter cooling in northwestern Europe and weaker West African and Indian monsoons. Yet only two of the 91 national adaptation plans mention it.

Responsibility of everyone

Because any return from overshoot depends on carbon removal, the rules governing how removals are counted matter as much as the removals themselves. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is drafting a 2027 methodology report that will establish how countries record carbon removal and capture in their national inventories, including the contentious use of captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery. Permissive rules could allow temporary or reversible carbon sinks to disguise delays in phasing out fossil fuels. Some petrostates favor broad inclusion, while vulnerable countries call for durable, verifiable standards. The same wariness of shortcuts has led African environment ministers to call for an international nonuse agreement on solar geoengineering, citing risks to monsoons and the moral hazard of delaying emissions reductions.

As for COP31, Türkiye holds the presidency and hosts the summit, while Australia’s climate minister, Chris Bowen, presides over the negotiations. Both hosts have emphasized their own initiatives: Türkiye’s Action Agenda favors voluntary efforts on zero waste, oceans and electrification, while Australia has centered the Pacific. Such agendas can help build coalitions and keep attention on practical solutions. Both hosts also have significant fossil-fuel sectors and face transition challenges common to many economies. Their credibility will depend less on the agendas they promote than on whether they can keep the hardest negotiating questions open, namely finance, adaptation, loss and damage and carbon-removal accounting, and drive them toward decisions all parties can defend.

Budget defines results

Money will determine whether Antalya delivers tangible results. The finance goal adopted at COP29 commits developed countries to take the lead in mobilizing at least $300 billion (TL 15.1 trillion) a year for developing countries by 2035, within a broader ambition of raising $1.3 trillion annually from all sources. Climate finance delivered in 2022 stood at approximately $116 billion, meaning that the core target requires roughly a 2.5-fold increase. This is achievable if multilateral development banks honor their pledge to increase climate lending to $120 billion by 2030. The difficulty, however, lies in the terms of financing: much of the climate finance provided takes the form of loans, adding to the debt burdens of countries least able to bear them.

The Baku to Belem Roadmap to $1.3 trillion sets out several remedies: replenishing concessional finance, easing sovereign debt burdens, lowering the cost of capital, reforming development bank balance sheets and tapping new sources of revenue, such as proceeds from the EU’s carbon border levy or a global shipping levy. Without such reforms, the $1.3 trillion ambition risks repeating the failure of the previous $100 billion target.

The gap is starkest in the area of loss and damage. The startup window of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage holds $342 million, while the fund has received 176 requests totalling approximately $2.8 billion. Its board, meeting in Manila after COP31, must therefore allocate resources amid demand that exceeds available funding by more than eightfold. This is not a gap. It is a chasm.

The Pacific Resilience Facility offers a more encouraging model. Headquartered in Nuku’alofa and ratified this year by Fiji, Australia, Palau and the Solomon Islands, among others, it is the first international financing institution owned and operated by Pacific states. It targets the "missing middle” of community adaptation and disaster-preparedness projects: those too small for development banks to finance but too large for microfinance. The facility is gathering $173 million in pledges, including a AU$100 million Australian ($68.9 million) foundational contribution from Australia, toward an initial target of $500 million. Its key lesson is that money moves fastest when vulnerable communities have control over the institutions responsible for disbursing it.

Collisions everywhere

The presidency’s "35-by-35” pledge aims to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption from just over a fifth today to 35% by 2035, a trajectory that the International Energy Agency (IEA) associates with a 1.5-degree Celsius pathway. Yet the IEA also expects electricity demand from data centers, driven by artificial intelligence, to roughly double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. If new clean-energy capacity is absorbed by data centers, coal and gas will have to meet the remaining demand.

Developing countries, whose clean-energy projects already face capital costs two to three times higher than those in wealthier economies, would be left short of the resources needed for their own energy transitions. Civil-society groups therefore want the pledge to prioritize energy access and require any new demand to be met by additional renewable energy capacity.

Where diplomacy has struggled to enforce, courts are stepping in. In 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advised, unanimously, that states owe obligations under international law to exercise due diligence in preventing significant harm from greenhouse gas emissions. The opinion is not binding, but domestic courts are already using it.

In January, a Dutch court, citing the ICJ, found that the Netherlands had violated Articles 8 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to protect the island of Bonaire as it protects the European mainland.

In June, a Paris court ruled under France’s duty-of-vigilance law that TotalEnergies must count the emissions from burning its products in its risk mapping. Pledges are becoming legal baselines against which negligence can be tested.

Trade is another pressure point. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) describes a fragmented world economy in which America, China and the EU compete through subsidies and tariffs for clean-technology dominance. Africa mines most of the world’s cobalt yet retains less than 1% of the value created along the battery supply chain. Developing countries also regard Europe’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, designed to prevent carbon leakage, as a penalty on exporters lacking the capital to decarbonize quickly. Recycling its revenues into concessional finance, as the roadmap contemplates, would turn a grievance into a source of support.

Success in Antalya will be measured less by the adoption of new headline targets than by whether pledges translate into actual disbursements, grants are prioritized over loans for the most vulnerable countries, carbon removals are subject to rigorous accounting and electrification is accompanied by an explicit commitment to reducing fossil-fuel use. These are the benchmarks against which the conference’s outcomes should be assessed.