5 things to know going into the COP31 climate meeting

In the shadow of global conflict and a record-setting year for climate extremes, countries are once again meeting for the United Nations’ annual climate conference, which in previous years produced the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement and a 2023 pledge to phase out fossil fuels.

Called COP31 (for the 31st meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change), it will take place in Antalya, Türkiye, between November 9 and 20 and will feature representatives of nearly 200 countries—but not the U.S. Just how much meaningful progress will be made towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging adaptation remains to be seen, particularly with the U.N. recently announcing that the world will blow past the Paris accord’s aim of keeping warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

“You have this moment that all these leaders are meeting that is very fraught and is fraught along lines of energy, along lines of war, along lines of climate disasters and record temperatures and record disruptions all at once,” says Kate Guy, a senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former climate diplomat under the Biden administration.

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Here are five big things to know.

The climate isn’t in good shape

If you needed a sign that the climate is in trouble, you’d have several to choose from: Last month was the warmest October on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), based in Europe. That puts 2026 on track to be among the hottest years on record—with 2027 in the running to be even hotter with an exceptionally strong El Niño in place. The past four years—2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026—are set to be the hottest four on record, the World Meteorological Organization predicts.

On top of that, C3S said that average global temperatures this year are “virtually certain” to exceed 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. In recent days, in fact, global surface temperatures have already exceeded two degrees C above preindustrial levels. Though individual days or even years don’t mean the Paris Agreement has been breached, it’s a sign of which direction the world is heading.

But even though the planet is likely to surpass the 1.5-degree-C mark, every bit of warming that is avoided will limit damage from heat waves, downpours and rising sea levels. “How much or how long will we overshoot? That's still within our grasp,” says Rachel Cleetus, climate program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The U.S. will be officially absent

The U.S. is the world’s largest cumulative emitter of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change, from fossil fuels. And today the country is the planet’s second largest annual emitter, after China. Yet the Trump administration will not send a formal delegation to this year’s talks. In January President Donald Trump also formally pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement—again—as well as the body that governs it.

That has slowed momentum at climate talks, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor of energy and environmental policy at Tufts University, who previously served as an adviser on energy policy in the Obama administration. “Once President Trump withdrew the United States from the [Paris] Agreement for a second time, it’s like all of the air sort of deflated from the balloon in the global negotiations,” she says.

Other officials, including state and local representatives, and climate scientists from the U.S. do plan to attend COP31, though.

The Iran war may be having an unintended green effect

In a backward kind of way, Trump’s actions at the global level—particularly the ongoing war with Iran—have encouraged an embrace of renewable energy. While this may not be a direct focus of the talks in Antalya, it’s important context for what’s happening in private markets around the world, Gallagher says.

The war in Iran and the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz have cut off key sources of oil and natural gas, driving the cost of those fuels up. In response, as Scientific American previously reported, some countries have leaned on renewable energy. Others, meanwhile, have turned back to coal.

“All of these things are intersecting with each other, and that’s really the backdrop, right now, for the talks in Türkiye,” Guy says.

Climate-linked disasters like the recent Nepal floods are likely to be top of mind

In late August horrific floods likely triggered by a nearby landslide swept through parts of Nepal and Tibet, killing at least 1,455 people. Although scientists are still working to sort out climate change’s role in the disaster, experts say the odds of this kind of event—a slip or break in frozen soil—have become more likely as global temperatures warm.

At COP31 the Nepal floods and other recent climate-related disasters will almost certainly color conversations about how countries are preparing for climate change, experts say, as well as around compensation for when tragedies strike.

“More and more, climate is not some future problem. It’s increasingly here and now and costing lives and livelihoods as we speak,” Guy says.

In response to the floods, Nepal requested payment from the U.N.’s climate loss-and-damage fund, created in 2022 to support countries bearing a disproportionate burden of climate-change-related damage. But collecting enough money from the U.S. and other wealthy countries for the fund has proved difficult.

Some countries organized their own, fossil-free COP

In 2023 delegates at COP28 pledged to transition away from fossil fuels. But after reported pushback from petrostates such as Saudi Arabia at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last year, delegates couldn’t agree on a shared plan to follow through on that pledge.

In response, dozens of countries met independently in April in Santa Marta, Colombia, to make their own fossil-free plans. Brazil released a fossil-free “roadmap” inspired in part by those meetings shortly before COP31.

Whether that plan—or any agreement—will gain traction is another question.

At forums like COP, it may be possible to secure "ambitious agreements” such as the Paris Agreement, Cleetus says. “But the rubber hits the road when you go home, and countries have to go home and implement them.”