COP31 Opens in Antalya as UN Warns Adaptation Finance Covers a Fraction of Needs

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The UN climate conference, COP31, opens today, 9 November, in Antalya, Türkiye, and runs until 20 November. Representatives of more than 190 countries are expected, according to UN News.

Türkiye hosts and presides over the summit, while Australia leads the negotiations, working closely with Pacific island countries. The COP31 President-Designate is Murat Kurum, Türkiye's Minister of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change. He has said the host's goal is an "implementation-focused summit", according to the official COP31 website.

The talks open in a year in which, according to the UN, scientists have confirmed that the world is on track to exceed the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C warming limit, and a strong El Niño is expected to intensify climate impacts.

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Several issues remain unresolved going into the talks, according to UN News. Developing countries want wealthier nations to meet their finance commitments under the Paris Agreement. Countries agreed last year to set up a mechanism to support the shift to cleaner economies, but have yet to decide how it will work. Negotiators are also still working on how to measure progress on adaptation, and governments remain divided on how to strengthen action on emissions.

The summit's Action Agenda covers clean energy, food security, resilient cities, greener industries, oceans and waste reduction.

On 4 November, the UN Environment Programme published its 2026 Adaptation Gap Report. It estimates that developing countries will need about US$305 billion a year by 2035 to adapt to climate change. International public adaptation finance from developed to developing countries reached US$28.2 billion to US$31.7 billion in 2024, about US$1 billion more than a year earlier.

Even if those flows are tripled by 2035, as countries aspired to at COP30 in Brazil last year, they would cover only 20% to 29% of needs, the report says. Flows to least developed countries and small island developing states rose in real terms between 2019 and 2024, but have fallen from a peak in 2022.

"The world is not ready to adapt to current climactic conditions, never mind what overshoot of 1.5°C will bring," said Inger Andersen, UNEP's Executive Director.

The COP31 Presidency has also announced the first five pilot countries for its Climate Implementation Bridge, which helps countries turn climate plans into projects that can attract finance: Ethiopia, Fiji, Indonesia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. It said small island developing states and least developed countries had shown strong interest.

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The Maldives, one of the world's lowest-lying countries, is among the small island states most exposed to sea-level rise and warming seas. Two young Maldivians, Yania Hussain Ishan and Lasan Sabah, were selected to join the country's delegation through the Youth Track to COP31, run by the Ministry of Climate Change, Environment and Energy and UNICEF Maldives, according to a UNICEF release in September. More than 40 young people drafted recommendations that were presented to Climate Minister Ali Shareef, for the head of the Maldivian delegation to take to the conference.

The government had not announced on the President's Office website who will lead the Maldivian delegation at the time of writing. President Mohamed Muizzu attended COP28 in Dubai in 2023 and COP29 in Baku in 2024.

Maldives Today has reported on a strong El Niño expected to peak in December, with seas around the Maldives running up to 2°C above normal, and on the first global IUCN coral reef assessment, which rated all three Maldivian reef ecoregions critically endangered. In October, the Green Climate Fund accredited the Malé lender MFLC as the first Maldivian direct access entity, allowing it to develop funding proposals itself.

Clean energy is expanding fast, according to UN News: one in four new cars sold worldwide in 2025 was electric, and the world added more than 600 gigawatts of solar capacity that year.