As technical negotiators race to lay the ground for the big political fights coming in the second week of COP31, delegates will spend their Saturday night at a stocktaking plenary presided over by Türkiye and Australia, where countries’ first red lines are expected to emerge.
Countries will have to decide whether to move forward with a cover decision as the main outcome from the Antalya talks. Some large developing countries have pushed back on it all week, as well as on any inclusion of sectoral targets, including a flagship new pledge to increase electrification to 35% by 2035.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell told a press conference on Saturday morning that progress so far has been “constructive” and praised the fact that negotiations were able to start on time as countries avoided what had seemed to be shaping up as a fight over the agenda.
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As technical negotiators race to lay the ground for the big political fights coming in the second week of COP31, delegates will spend their Saturday night at a stocktaking plenary presided over by Türkiye and Australia, where countries’ first red lines are expected to emerge.
Countries will have to decide whether to move forward with a cover decision as the main outcome from the Antalya talks. Some large developing countries have pushed back on it all week, as well as on any inclusion of sectoral targets, including a flagship new pledge to increase electrification to 35% by 2035.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell told a press conference on Saturday morning that progress so far has been “constructive” and praised the fact that negotiations were able to start on time as countries avoided what had seemed to be shaping up as a fight over the agenda.
He added that Saturday’s plenary will provide a sense of the most controversial issues, which government ministers now flying will have to take up and settle.
As of now, most issues on the formal agenda still need a lot of work. The cover text is more a wishlist of every proposal tabled and still needs to be worked up into a draft – expected by early next week.
An informal note on the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP), which tackles cutting planet-heating emissions, is heavily bracketed. The EU has said one of its priorities is to extend the MWP, with current options for a timeline going up to 2030, 2031 or 2040 (at COP45!). The MWP has so far delivered weak outcomes, but the current fight is over whether to expand its scope and task it with informing the next Global Stocktake of climate policies in 2028.
A separate draft text on the global goal on adaptation released overnight is set to become the main battleground for Africa’s top priority to triple adaptation finance to “at least $120 billion per year by 2035”, based on a previous goal set in 2021 – a figure it wants agreed in Antalya.
Another option in the text proposes starting a process to review several elements of this finance target – which was adopted in the final deal at COP30 – including the baseline, the total amount and its scope. It requests this to be reflected in a report that would then be considered at a later summit. African countries are likely to push back on this idea.
An informal note that includes the set-up of a new Just Transition Mechanism also came out late on Friday and has been condemned by civil society groups for the limited scope of what it would be expected to achieve.
In the meantime, the Turkish and Australian co-presidency has continued consultations on a number of issues, including on how to strengthen the UN climate process itself. Some countries – including Arab nations, Mexico, Korea and Switzerland – have proposed switching COPs to a biennial format, instead of the current yearly summits.
Brazil says it wants to host third fossil fuel phase-out conference
Brazilian President Lula da Silva told civil society in Antalya this week that his country should host the third global conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF), which would likely fall in 2028.
“We have the moral obligation,” Lula said at a meeting before heading off to the Philippines for the ASEAN summit. The Brazilian president told the event he came to Antalya to demonstrate that “no country has more credibility on climate” than his.
The first conference on TAFF was held in Santa Marta by a coalition of around 60 governments that decided to take voluntary measures to wean their economies off coal, oil and gas. The next conference is expected to take place mid-next year in Tuvalu, with a pre-conference event for academics, subnational governments and civil society in Dublin.
In Antalya, Brazil’s COP30 presidency held a big launch event for a voluntary global roadmap it produced to help countries shift off fossil fuels, proposing a build-up of clean energy systems followed by a push to start phasing out coal, oil and gas production and consumption after 2031.
Currently, a proposal to welcome the Brazil-led roadmap in the formal UN negotiations is included in the COP31 cover decision, as well as an option for “ongoing implementation” of a COP28 landmark deal to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
