It is clear—even if diehard climate negotiators find it hard to admit openly—that foundational negotiations under the Paris Agreement are behind us, and the era of implementation is here. Nearly every COP since Paris has been labeled an “implementation COP,” and COP31 is no exception. Yet we still lack a common understanding of what implementation means.
For many outside the climate negotiations, implementation means tangible outcomes—cheaper, cleaner and more secure energy, stronger resilience and safety from climate impacts, access to clean air and water, and a sustainable and thriving economy. Within the UN climate process, some appear to envision implementation more narrowly as whether countries are meeting their obligations in terms of conduct under the Paris Agreement and whether its processes are functioning as intended. Both matter. But ultimately the purpose of the Paris Agreement is to result in real climate action.
Implementation requires us to make the UN climate architecture work as intended by making progress on four fronts:
- Taking care of the “basics” — honoring binding obligations that are set out in the Paris Agreement, including: to submit more ambitious nationally determined contributions and biennial transparency reports on time, as well as to provide support to developing countries through fully delivering on the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance.
- Effectively utilizing available tools, in particular the five-year ambition cycle with the global stocktake (GST) and enhanced transparency framework at its core.
- Better connecting negotiated outcomes to real-world delivery through the Global Climate Action Agenda.
- Ensuring that the UNFCCC process is focused, efficient, and fit for purpose.
COP31 must take steps to meet the challenge across all four of these dimensions. On the first two, countries must deliver on the obligations they have agreed to and make full use of the mechanisms they have collectively designed to strengthen ambition and implementation over time. This should not be controversial—and yet obligations and deadlines have seemingly been treated as optional, and woefully inadequate and ineffective use has been made of the components of the Paris Agreement’s ambition cycle.
Beyond making existing commitments and mechanisms work as intended, some parts of the architecture could be improved: the connection between negotiated outcomes and delivery on the ground, and the ability of the negotiating process itself to remain functional and effective. COP31 could take useful steps in the right direction on these.
Improving the UN climate regime to more effectively facilitate implementation will require political commitment. COP31 will take place amid deepening geopolitical fragmentation, tightening budgets, and increasingly severe, frequent and visible impacts of climate change—not to mention an overshoot of the 1.5C limit looming heavily over this year’s negotiations.
Countries are increasingly calling for improvements to make the process more effective—at least if discussions among ministers at the Pre-COP in Fiji are anything to go by. Promisingly, the UNFCCC is already taking steps to evolve, as Climate Home News Editor Megan Rowlings noted in a recent column.
Notably, the regime is increasingly recognizing voluntary international cooperative initiatives where groups of countries and other stakeholders can choose to move further and faster together, where it is not possible to reach consensus among all 190+ Parties to the Paris Agreement—the “two-tier multilateralism” highlighted by the COP30 President.
And the structure of the GCAA has been aligned with the agreed outcomes of GST1. This potentially transformational change could demonstrate how to translate Paris goals into practical and visible action.
From Negotiations to Delivery
The GCAA can serve as an incubator for testing the most accessible and effective climate solutions for inclusion in future national climate targets.
Despite this, the GCAA still feels marginal to the negotiations at COPs. For the GCAA to realize its potential, work remains to bring it further into the political center of the UN climate process. The action agenda should no longer be confined to side events. It needs to be recognized as central to the main event—and embraced for its potential to be supportive of implementing negotiated outcomes, including in the context of GST2 which will be launched at COP31.
COP30 launched the Belém Mission to 1.5 (BM1.5) to define ambition, gaps and political priorities, providing the context for the work of a Global Implementation Accelerator (GIA) that will identify high-impact, scalable solutions from the GCAA. A Climate Implementation Bridge, hosted in partnership with UNEP, will then work with countries to build investment roadmaps aligned with GIA solutions and the BM1.5 vision. The COP30 and COP31 Presidencies will report back on the GIA in Antalya and further clarify this “cooperation ecosystem.” Negotiators should be involved in identifying the priority solutions under the GIA each year, thus cementing the link between negotiations and climate action.
There could also be a standing requirement for the Climate High-Level Champions to report to Parties on the progress of the GCAA each year. One way to operationalize this could be to promote the closing GCAA high-level event as a key accountability moment, raising the profile of particularly transformational developments under the GCAA while the Yearbook of Climate Action and the annual GCAA report provide a fuller picture of progress on GST1 outcomes. To further connect negotiations with the GCAA, countries could also be invited to appoint national focal points for the GCAA on a voluntary basis.
Placing a stronger focus the action agenda can, in turn, create the conditions for further political action. But no action agenda can compensate for a negotiating process that loses sight of its purpose.
Ensuring the Negotiating System Remains Fit for Purpose
Implementation is not only about mobilizing action outside the negotiating rooms. It also requires discipline within them.
Heading into COP31, we would all do well to recall the UN climate regime’s ultimate objective: stabilizing greenhouse gases at a level and within a timeframe that allows us to adapt. The Paris Agreement and subsequent decisions have set this level at 1.5C. But the UNFCCC and its agendas have become so complicated and burdensome that it is easy to take our collective eyes off this central prize.
The UN system is dealing with threats to multilateralism, manifesting most acutely as fiscal constraint and increasing demands for greater efficiency and impact. At the same time, expectations of—and burdens placed on—the UNFCCC are growing. Several new agenda items have been proposed ahead of COP31 to add to an ever-increasing negotiating workload that no single country can cope with.
New challenges will arise. But before establishing new agenda items, processes or mechanisms, Parties should carefully evaluate their cost and impact, asking: will they materially improve delivery of agreed objectives of the Convention and goals of the Paris Agreement, or add procedural complexity to an already crowded system? Evolution of the UN climate regime could be a collective and planned exercise. The alternative will be a chaotic consequence of UNFCCC budget negotiations.
In a world that has entered a period of climate overshoot, the UN climate regime must demonstrate at COP31 that it remains capable of advancing a collective response equal to the scale of the challenge, directing scarce political and financial capital toward impact rather than procedure.
The tools exist: an ambition cycle designed to regularly review and facilitate stronger commitments and implementation, and a repurposed action agenda capable of supporting both. The task ahead is to make those elements work in harmony, as intended.
The commitment of Türkiye and Australia to hold consultations on how to improve the functioning of the UNFCCC is to be strongly welcomed. While it may not make front page headlines, history may show that COP31 was a pivotal moment in the evolution of the UN climate regime to deliver on implementation.
