The stepping-stone meetings on the road to COP31 in Antalya unfolding in Bonn this week brought the first real clarity on what the incoming presidency wants the next UN climate summit to deliver on: electrification, reducing waste, and the energy efficiency of buildings and construction.

The three headline targets call for electricity to meet 35% of final energy demand by 2035, up from just over 20% today, a goal the presidency calls “35 by 35”. The second would halve the growth in global waste by the same date, and the third would cut the energy intensity of buildings by at least a quarter.

Together, they chart a course around sectors that are among the largest sources of global greenhouse gas emissions; the buildings sector alone accounts for around 37% of the global total.

As buildings, energy use and production and waste are also among the world’s leading contributors to air pollution that kills around 7 millon people annually, real reductions in emissions from the three sectors would also translate into near-term gains for health.  And progress on the targets would help reduce superpollutants, like methane and black carbon, that exacerbate warming as well as harming health. See related story:

Reducing Emissions of ‘Super Pollutants’ Would Slam Emergency Brake on Global Warming

But the agenda deliberately omits any reference to reducing or phasing out fossil-fuels in the process.  It is thus built to dodge the political torpedoes that sank the last two COPs, in Brazil and Azerbaijan.

The presidency has cast the package as the practical core of an “implementation COP”, echoing Brazil’s framing of COP30 a year ago.

“We need this COP to be a COP of implementation and acceleration,” said Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister and COP31’s president of negotiations, calling the agenda “an impressive blueprint to help us do that.”

Money missing from agenda

Yet money — the other perennial battleground of recent UN climate summits, and the thing that makes any implementation possible — is also absent from the core agenda.

Beyond the three headline goals, the presidency’s ten-theme Action Agenda spans food security, oceans, green industrialisation, youth and education, and, of significant note for the health community, a pillar on resilient health systems.

The core targets, like the rest of the Action Agenda, are set by the presidency and are political objectives, not guaranteed outcomes. Countries must choose to take them up on their own in Antalya during formal negotiations to transform targets into binding commitments.

And the political momentum pushed by a presidency is not always enough to get a deal over the line. Hosting last year’s summit in the heart of the Amazon, a setting meant to put the critical role of rainforests in balancing the global climate at the centre of the talks, Brazil threw its weight behind a roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation, backed by more than 90 countries. It never made the final text, with over 100 nations declining to support the roadmaps Brazil’s presidency championed.

“What the world needs today is not another round of promises,” COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum told delegates in Bonn. “It needs to see existing commitments delivered.”

1.5°C’s life or death moment

Planet on Course to Permanently Breach 1.5°C Limit by 2030

The new targets for Antalya land as the planet closes in on the 1.5°C limit UN climate negotiations are intended to defend.

While the presidency lists protecting that threshold in its official targets, the latest science shows the planet is on course to breach it permanently around 2030.

The electrification target is explicitly designed to hold the world on a 1.5°C path, based on International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) modelling. But with the fossil fuels behind roughly 70% of global emissions absent from the agenda, the presidency’s strategy looks more like pragmatic damage control than a course correction.

Human-caused warming reached 1.37°C last year, and global emissions hit a record 56.8 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2024, according to the annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report, published last week.

A separate analysis released in Bonn on Tuesday by Climate Analytics found that fossil fuel use must halve by 2035 to keep 1.5°C within reach. The growth in CO2 emissions has begun to slow, but emissions are still climbing, not falling.

“Fossil fuels are still pouring oil on the climate fire,” said Neil Grant, a senior mitigation expert at Climate Analytics. “We need to cut fossil fuel use sharply this decade, halve it by 2035, and drive it down to real zero by 2070.”

“The safer route is a rapid, planned phase-out of fossil fuels, powered by clean electrification,” said Bill Hare, the group’s chief executive.

The other key battleground of every COP since Paris – money – is not addressed in the presidency agenda either. A concept note circulated in Bonn unveiled a “Global Implementation Accelerator” and a “Climate Implementation Bridge” to speed climate solutions to the ground.

Both are coordination structures. Neither is a fund, and the presidency specifies that no new money is attached.

A target for an electric age

The electrification goal draws on analysis from IRENA, whose latest roadmap finds electricity must rise from around 23% of final energy use today to 35% by 2035, and above 50% by 2050, to stay on a 1.5°C-compatible path.

The co-presidents frame the pitch as a move towards energy security as much as climate action. The protection renewables can offer from fossil fuel price shocks is drawing fresh attention as the war in the Middle East drives up oil and gas prices, forcing low- and middle-income countries to dig into their treasuries to afford the basic functions of government.

Electrification can be a hedge: cheaper, home-grown power that shields households, central banks and economies from volatile global markets and the geopolitical shocks that move them.

“The good news is that the answer to improved energy reliability and energy sovereignty is also the answer for emissions reduction – that is more electrification, more renewable energy, sovereign and reliable forms of energy, which is also cheap and is also the best for the climate,” Bowen said.

“Accelerating the energy transition will ease shocks to our energy systems, better protect our economies and households from high costs, and help keep bending the curve of emissions downwards,” he added, describing electrification as “the key to transitioning away from fossil fuels.”

But more electricity only cuts emissions if the power behind it is clean. While broadly welcoming the strategy, environmental groups warned it must be matched with investment in expanding renewables.

“More electricity alone is not the answer if it is still powered by coal, oil and gas,” said Fernanda de Carvalho, global climate and policy head at WWF. “Developing countries will also need finance and technology support to make this transition fair and effective.”

The targets released in Bonn do not specify how the extra electricity should be produced.

“Electrification can only deliver meaningful climate benefits if the power comes from renewables, not fossil fuels,” said Duygu Kutluay, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels.

Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, who has thrown his weight behind the electrification push, urged delegates not to backslide.

“We don’t have time to re-open past debates or renegotiate commitments already made,” Stiell told the Bonn summit. “Tackling the global climate crisis is the hardest, but most important, thing humanity has ever tried to do together. It is worth doing, because we have no choice.”

What kind of waste?

The second target takes aim at the climate impact of the world’s waste. The presidency wants to halve the growth in global waste by 2035, notably, not halve waste generation itself.

The world already generates around 2.1 billion tonnes of solid waste a year, a figure the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) projects will climb to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050 in a business-as-usual scenario.

Mounting piles of trash and landfills are also a growing climate problem, with organic waste rotting in dumps one of the largest human sources of methane, a major accelerator of global warming.

Methane is responsible for nearly 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. Food waste alone accounts for around 10% of global emissions, much of it as methane, a gas roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term.

Yet because methane breaks down in the atmosphere within about 12 years, against centuries for carbon dioxide, cutting it is prized in climate diplomacy as a vital “emergency brake” on near-term warming. Reducing waste-related methane emissions, and along with that, waste incineration in low- and middle-income countries would also improve air quality directly and indirectly since methane is an important precursor of ground-level ozone.

What the presidency’s target actually means is also hard to define – particularly since the target makes no reference to a baseline year and does not specify what kinds of waste would be covered.

That ambiguity matters, as some waste streams, plastics above all, are politically explosive enough to derail a negotiation.

The missing piece: plastics

UN Plastics Treaty Talks Fail Again After Overnight Deadlock

While the target’s climate aspirations are positive, sidestepping plastics production could prove a gift to petrostates in the long run. A downstream focus on managing and recycling waste, rather than capping production, is exactly what petrostates fought to protect when global plastics treaty talks collapsed in Geneva last year.

A bloc led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, with the United States aligned, blocked any binding limit on production. More than 100 countries, unwilling to leave the upstream untouched, ultimately walked rather than accept a weak deal.

With less than a tenth of the world’s plastic recycled and production on track to triple by 2060, the same production-versus-waste-management fight could resurface at COP31.

The cause is also a signature of Türkiye’s first lady, Emine Erdoğan, who chairs the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Zero Waste, established by Secretary-General António Guterres in 2023 after a Türkiye-led resolution declared 30 March the International Day of Zero Waste.

A Zero Waste forum in Istanbul this month, organised by the foundation she heads, drew Guterres, UNEP chief Inger Andersen and Stiell, but produced no new commitments, even as it set up zero waste to be a central feature of the Antalya agenda.

The building target that quietly shrank

The third goal aims to reduce the energy intensity of the buildings sector by at least 25% by 2035.

Buildings and construction are heavyweight emitters, responsible for around 37% of global emissions and nearly half of all raw material extraction, from the sand, gravel and cement that go into concrete to the steel that frames it.

Roughly half the buildings that will stand in 2050 have yet to be built, most of them in fast-growing economies in Asia and Africa, according to UNEP.

How those millions of structures are built will lock in emissions for decades. A wave of poorly insulated, fossil-powered construction would commit the world to rising energy demand for the lifespan of every structure.

Despite the sector’s importance, the target was watered down hours after it landed, Climate Home News reported, another sign the presidency’s politically careful agenda may face serious headwinds once negotiations begin.

An initial presidency statement set a goal of a 25% increase in energy efficiency. A “small update” issued a day later swapped it for a 25% cut in energy consumption intensity. No reason was given.

The two metrics are not the same. Energy intensity measures the energy used per square metre, and can be brought down through superficial steps such as dimming lights or adjusting how a building is run, leaving structures untouched.

An efficiency target would force the costly structural work that delivers lasting cuts: insulation, heat pumps and retrofitted building envelopes. Recast as an intensity goal, the target can be met by operational tinkering while the deep renovations the sector needs are put off.

The fight the agenda leaves out

The shape of the COP31 agenda emerges as a pragmatic political choice to build the summit around problems less divisive than the fossil fuel and finance fights that tanked the last two COPs.

At COP30 in Belém last November, a bloc of petrostates led by Saudi Arabia drew more than half the nations present to its side and stripped every reference to fossil fuels from the final text, killing a phase-out roadmap that some 80 countries had backed.

Under the UN’s consensus rules, a single nation can veto language, even against majority support. With Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States flanked by other major petrostates set to be in the room, any text dealing with fossil fuel phase-out will be dead on arrival.

The concession is a pragmatic but significant moment in the world’s fight against the climate crisis: the fossil fuels driving it are no longer seen as worth fighting over, a reality the joint presidency is conceding before talks begin.

That deadlock has forced the fossil fuel question to splinter off into a diplomatic track of its own. Frustrated by the inability of the core UN climate talks to move forward, 57 governments convened in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April for the first summit dedicated to phasing out oil, gas and coal, declaring the transition “past its point of no return.”

While the coalition’s power is limited, its creation signals a new shift in the phase-out fight. The Santa Marta countries account for about a fifth of global fossil fuel production, and include sizeable producers such as Norway, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Nigeria and host Colombia.

The world’s five biggest fossil fuel producers – the United States, China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia – stayed away from the talks.

For now, the higher-ambition camp is left to build toward a phase-out on its own, while the UN process moves on around it. The coalition will meet again in 2027 on the Pacific island of Tuvalu, co-hosted by Ireland.

The money that isn’t there

Achieving the presidency’s three targets, despite their limitations, would be a major achievement in the fight against the climate crisis.

But the question of who will pay to make them real, and how much – the defining fight of every COP in recent years as the world shifts from diplomatic documents to delivery – stands to derail the agenda altogether.

As of today, the world is paying a tiny fraction of the true costs of the three agenda items alone.

Meeting the electrification pathway requires global grid investment to roughly double, to about $1.2 trillion a year, IRENA estimates.

Investment in building energy efficiency must more than double to $5.9 trillion by 2030, according to UNEP’s Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction. The direct cost of managing the world’s waste, around $252 billion in 2020, is set to nearly double by mid-century, according to UNEP’s Global Waste Management Outlook.

The headline goal agreed at COP29 in Baku commits developed countries to mobilise “at least” $300 billion a year for the developing world by 2035, a figure the Global South denounced as a “betrayal”, alongside an aspirational, all-sources target of $1.3 trillion.

On the current trajectory, analysts estimate the flows covered by that goal will reach barely $427 billion a year by 2035, less than a third of the target.

Developing economies received around $196 billion in climate finance in 2023, with more than half of it arriving as loans rather than grants, deepening the debt of countries already crumbling under foreign repayment loads.

Even the institutions meant to deliver the “billions to trillions” now say it isn’t possible. World Bank President Ajay Banga has called the formula unrealistic, and the bank’s chief economist, Indermit Gill, has branded it a “fantasy.”

“Climate finance commitments to small island developing states are facing systemic collapse,” Anne Rasmussen, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, told a Bonn press conference on Tuesday.

“Developed partners are defaulting on their legal obligations under the Paris Agreement, and key financial mechanisms are being crippled. SIDS are effectively being blocked from implementing vital climate priorities. It leads us to question whether the implementation of the NCQG is dead on arrival, unless these breaches of legal duty are immediately reversed.”

The presidency’s new instruments take no steps to close that gap. Kurum has described the Climate Implementation Bridge as a way to turn national climate plans into “investable project portfolios” and help finance reach the ground faster, not as a new source of cash.

A wider finance crisis

Global Health Leaders Urge Fewer Agencies Amid Funding Crisis

The shortfall is part of a wider crisis across the development aid world. Developing countries need an estimated $4.3 trillion a year to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, including $1.8 trillion for climate, according to UN Trade and Development.

The OECD warns the overall financing gap, having grown 60% to $4 trillion, could reach $6.4 trillion by 2030 without reform. This year’s Financing for Sustainable Development Report concluded the shortfall “risks reversing decades of progress.”

Climate is competing for that money with everything else falling short. Humanitarian appeals drew their lowest funding in a decade in 2025, while food programmes, global health budgets and the finances of the UN itself buckle under simultaneous cuts, led by the United States’ retreat from much of the aid system.

As at every COP before it, the fate of Antalya is likely to rest less on the ambition of its targets than on whether anyone agrees to pay for them.

“Public finance is not a preference for us, it is an oxygen for us,” said Isatu Kamara, climate finance coordinator for the Least Developed Countries group.

Image Credits: Netcare-Alberton Hospital, UNFCCC, https://www.netcare.co.za/News-Hub/Articles/environmental-sustainability-at-the-heart-of-new-hospital-design, Ernest Ojeh/ Unsplash, WHO,2021.