ANTALYA – The 31st United Nations (UN) climate conference, COP31, got underway on Monday in the Turkish coastal city of Antalya, where some 100,000 people, including more than 90 heads of state and hundreds of ministers from nearly 200 countries, will gather over the next two weeks to decide what the world will or will not do to protect the future of the planet.
As has become routine, the summit follows a year of record-setting heat, floods, wildfires and drought across the globe. It is also the first since the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) concluded that the chance of holding warming to 1.5°C, the Paris Agreement’s landmark limit, “has been lost.”
On arrival at the sprawling Antalya Expo Centre, attendees who had not collected their badges the night before met a level of disorganisation reminiscent of the state of the negotiations themselves. This reporter’s wait to enter the venue lasted three hours, 21 minutes and 20 seconds, while others, stuck in highway traffic or unable to board the few buses, shuttles and trams to the venue, fared far worse.
For those brave enough to make it inside, the national pavilion halls play out like a world’s fair. Tajikistan’s is adorned with glaciers, a reminder of the Himalayan glacier collapse accelerated by climate change that killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal in August. Brazil’s is a rainforest, Oman’s a desert.
Across the hall, the UK pavilion honours the man who has arguably done more than anyone to protect the ecosystems the pavilions celebrate, the 100-year-old Sir David Attenborough.
From the moment planes land to when buses and trams pull into the Expo Centre grounds, COP31-themed slogans blanket the city. Some play on time (“Protecting tomorrow is today’s work”), others on public transit (“Next stop: a better future,” painted on the COP31 tram). Some are classic UN jargon (“Dialogue. Consensus. Action.”), while others are just silly (“Let’s COP!”).
Yet one in particular best captures what the hosts, delegates, civil society and attendees in Antalya hope the summit will deliver: “Where dialogue becomes action.”
“COP31 must help close the gap between commitment and delivery,” said Australian climate minister Chris Bowen, who presides over the negotiations under a power-sharing deal with Türkiye. He has made finance, electrification and the ocean his priorities, and advocates: “We must turn climate ambition into real-world outcomes.”
So can the world deliver?
“The success of the next two weeks of talks will be judged by two things. The appetite to deliver on the promises we have made, and the ability to move beyond the culture of declarations that has sullied previous conferences,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa.
Let’s COP!
In hallowed COP tradition, the opening ceremony began an hour and a half late. The talks ran into Sunday night, stumbling over developing countries’ demands to put climate finance on the official agenda. Still, by previous years’ standards, this was a relatively short stalemate.
While the overtime talks secured an agenda item on climate finance, a two-year work programme agreed in Belém on how rich countries meet their obligation under the Paris Agreement to fund climate action in developing ones, it came at a compromise.
An African Group request for a separate item on tripling adaptation finance, the money that helps countries cope with heat, floods and failed harvests, was withdrawn after late-night talks and will be taken up under other items instead, according to Climate Home News and AFP.
Adaptation finance was a key target of civil society and developing nations alike in the run-up to COP31 because of the confusion in the text agreed last year. At COP30 in Belém, countries pledged to “at least triple” adaptation finance by 2035, but never agreed on a baseline year to triple from, or a dollar figure.
As it stands, depending on how it is measured, the pledge would cover just 20% to 29% of the roughly $420 billion a year, adjusted for inflation, that developing countries will need by 2035 to adapt to a fast-accelerating climate crisis, UNEP found in its annual Adaptation Gap Report last week.
As money continues to fall short and warming accelerates, the 44 least developed countries (LDCs) called the looming overshoot of 1.5°C “a grave betrayal of our countries who have contributed least to this crisis” in their opening-day statement.
“COP31 cannot be another exercise in deferring difficult decisions,” said the group’s chair, Ambassador Adão Soares Barbosa of Timor-Leste. “It must deliver urgent emissions reductions, address temperature overshoot, access finance and tangible protection for those most at risk.”
‘Pandemic proportions’
Türkiye opened COP31 with a Health Day, and health ministers and global health leaders from Geneva to the Pacific came to Antalya to argue that the health consequences of climate change have reached catastrophic proportions.
“No health system can be made resilient to an endlessly warming world,” Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, told health ministers. “We must drive the transition away from fossil fuels fast and fairly.”
Stiell added that a health system can falter by degree: “A ward grows hotter. The power flickers. A refrigerator holding medicines fails. Floodwater enters a well. A mother in labor finds the road to the clinic cut off.”
At a separate press briefing on Monday, Stiell said the climate crisis is now “a global health crisis of pandemic proportions.”
Heat was linked to a record 710,000 deaths in 2023, almost three-quarters of them caused by climate change, the Lancet Countdown found last month. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels killed another 2.78 million people that year, and The Lancet authors argued that WHO should create a new category of public health emergency to classify the climate crisis.
“We can say that most heat deaths around the world are caused by climate change,” said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, who leads WHO’s climate and health work. “They’re climate change deaths.”
Money for war and death
But as dire warnings of health threats echoed around the room, for a third consecutive COP, following Brazil and Baku, governments did not announce any new investment or financing.
“Let me be direct,” said Brazil’s Health Minister, Alexandre Padilha. “Financing for health adaptation is insufficient and is falling down.”
International public commitments for health adaptation fell from about $3.2 billion in 2022 to $2.2 billion in 2024, just 5% of all international public adaptation finance, Padilha said.
Development aid fell 23% in 2025, its largest drop on record, according to OECD figures he cited, while global military spending has risen 41% in a decade to $2.9 trillion.
“Why [is there] always so much money for war and death,” he asked, “and so little for health, environment, and life?”
‘Declarations do not protect people’
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at his last COP as WHO Director-General before his term ends next August, traced health’s climb up the climate agenda, from pledges on climate-resilient health systems in Glasgow in 2021 to the first COP Health Day in Dubai and the Belém Health Action Plan last year.
“Each of those steps was driven by health ministers, but declarations do not protect people,” he said. “Implementation does.”
Tuvalu Health Minister Tuafafa Latasi said he spoke “from the front line of an immediate clinical and public health emergency,” with three of his country’s nine islands at high risk from cyclones, rising seas and salt seeping into groundwater.
“Protecting health in Tuvalu is a test of our shared humanity,” he said. “Our call at COP31 is simple: match strong climate commitment with practical support.”
In a WHO survey last year, more than 90% of countries named insufficient finance as a top barrier to their health and climate plans, Tedros said. Yet health has no item of its own in the formal talks, where climate finance is negotiated.
Resilient health systems are one of 10 priorities on Türkiye’s voluntary action agenda but, unlike electrification or waste, they have no numerical targets for 2035.
“Health is the human face of climate change,” Tedros told ministers. “It belongs in the negotiated text. It should be an explicit eligibility area for climate finance and its share should grow as adaptation finance grows.”
New ‘initiative’ launched
The headline launch from Health Day came with Türkiye and WHO’s announcement of what is known as the Antalya Initiative for Resilient Health Systems (AIR).
It is a voluntary scheme through which countries document what has worked in protecting health from climate shocks, what has not and what it cost, and share those lessons. In short, a shared feedback platform. But no countries announced their participation in the initiative as of Monday night.
“We want a successful solution developed in one country to be able to save lives in another,” said Türkiye’s Health Minister Kemal Memişoğlu. “We want to ensure that no country has to waste time reinventing solutions for the same problems.”
The initiative is designed to complement WHO’s Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH), a network of more than 100 countries that will hold their own summit on Tuesday at the COP31 health pavilion.
No funding, staff or list of participating countries has been published. Eighteen health organisations, led by Health Care Without Harm, have asked for the initiative to include a dedicated pillar for health workers.
Belém funding framework
Brazil, meanwhile, launched a financing framework for the Belém Health Action Plan, a voluntary list of about 60 non-binding measures now endorsed by 40 countries since it was launched last year.
Drawn up with Wellcome and the Rockefeller Foundation, it sets out for each measure which kinds of money could pay for it, from climate funds and development banks to philanthropy and national budgets, along with likely partners and examples of where it has worked.
“I wish to make it very clear: this is not a new fund,” Padilha said. “It’s a map to help countries make better use of the mechanisms that already exist.”
Much of what the plan covers, such as disease surveillance, early warning systems and training health workers, generates little or no revenue, Padilha said, yet countries are being asked to take on debt to pay for it. The framework is meant to steer those measures toward grants and public money instead, with progress to be reported by COP33 in 2028.
“With the financing framework, we have the map,” he said. “Now we need the investment.”
Alan Dangour, Wellcome’s director of climate and health, announced that the Climate and Health Funders Coalition, which pledged $300 million in Belém, had awarded more than $225 million in its first year and attracted $150 million in new commitments.
“We should approach climate negotiations as though people’s lives depend on them,” Dangour said, “because they do.”
‘Off the charts’
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The past 12 years are the 12 warmest on record, and the past four are the warmest of all, the WMO said in its report. Global temperatures from January to September averaged about 1.47°C above pre-industrial levels, and are likely to climb further as El Niño, forecast to be the strongest on record by December, takes hold.
“El Niño and indeed the state of the global climate in 2026 gives new meaning to the phrase off the charts,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “El Niño doesn’t add new heat to the planet. It releases heat from the ocean, which is the warmest ever measured.”
Saulo told reporters to “prepare for another record-breaking year in 2027.” Europe’s heatwaves, drought and wildfires this year caused more than 30,000 excess deaths by preliminary estimates, the report found.
For the first time, WHO has classified El Niño’s expected health impacts as a health emergency, according to WMO. The Lancet Countdown has urged WHO to go further and create a new instrument recognising climate change itself as a global health emergency.
Three in four national weather services send health information to their countries’ health ministries, Saulo said, but only one in four ministries treats it as relevant to their decisions.
“Early warnings help save lives. Early warnings for heat, for floods, for droughts,” she said. “But they cannot be just headlines. They need to be translated into action.”
Image Credits: WHO/PAHO/Karina Zambrana .
