By Md Mahir Daiyan
From Paris to Dubai, Baku, Belém and now Antalya, world leaders have repeatedly strengthened climate pledges. But as COP31 approaches, scientific assessments show that the gap between diplomatic promises and actual emissions reductions remains dangerously wide.
For more than a decade, the world’s major environmental and climate conferences have produced increasingly ambitious commitments: keep global warming close to 1.5°C, reach net-zero emissions around mid-century, rapidly expand renewable energy, protect forests, increase adaptation and mobilise trillions of dollars for developing countries.
Yet in 2026, the central question facing international climate diplomacy is no longer whether governments understand the danger of climate change. The question is whether political leaders can implement their promises quickly enough.
The evidence from the physical climate system is becoming harder to ignore. The World Meteorological Organization says 2015–2025 were the 11 warmest years ever recorded. The global average temperature in 2025 was around 1.43–1.44°C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial baseline, making it the second or third warmest year on record. Ocean heat content also reached its highest level in the observational record.
This means international climate conferences are taking place against a very different background from that of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Climate change is no longer primarily a future projection. It has become an economic, humanitarian, food-security, energy-security and development challenge occurring in real time.
Paris created the global climate architecture
The 2015 Paris Agreement established what remains the central political objective of global climate policy: keeping the increase in global average temperature well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.
Instead of imposing identical emissions limits on every country, Paris created the system of Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. Governments periodically submit national climate plans explaining how they intend to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and adapt to climate impacts.
The concept was politically powerful because it brought almost every country into a common framework. But it also created one of today’s biggest challenges: countries can announce increasingly ambitious targets while implementation depends largely on domestic politics, finance, technology and economic priorities.
Ten years after Paris, progress is visible, but it remains insufficient. UNEP estimates that temperature projections have fallen considerably compared with expectations around the time of the Paris Agreement. Nevertheless, implementation of existing climate pledges would still leave the world substantially above the Paris temperature objectives.
COP28 changed the language on energy
The Dubai climate conference, COP28 in 2023, became a landmark because governments formally acknowledged the need to move the global energy system away from fossil fuels.
The UAE Consensus called for global action towards tripling renewable-energy capacity by 2030 and doubling the average annual rate of energy-efficiency improvement. Countries also agreed to accelerate the phase-down of unabated coal power, reduce inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies and transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just and orderly manner.
COP28 therefore transformed renewable energy from an environmental aspiration into one of the central benchmarks of global economic policy.
But the target is enormous. Solar, wind, grids, batteries, electric transportation and clean industrial technologies must expand at a speed rarely achieved in the history of the energy sector.
The transformation must also occur while developing countries are simultaneously trying to provide affordable electricity, industrialise and raise living standards.
That tension between development and decarbonisation remains one of the defining political challenges of global climate negotiations.
COP29 placed money at the centre
If COP28 was largely about energy, COP29 in Baku in 2024 became the “finance COP.”
Governments agreed on a new climate-finance goal under which developed countries would take the lead in mobilising at least $300 billion annually for developing countries by 2035. The agreement also called for broader public and private financial flows to developing countries to reach at least $1.3 trillion annually by 2035.
The figures are huge, but so are the requirements.
Developing economies need financing for renewable electricity, transmission networks, resilient agriculture, coastal protection, urban drainage, disaster preparedness, electric transport, industrial modernisation and adaptation to rising temperatures.
For highly climate-vulnerable countries, climate finance is therefore not simply environmental assistance. It increasingly determines whether governments can protect development gains from floods, cyclones, droughts, heatwaves and sea-level rise.
The debate has also shifted from simply asking “how much money?” to asking what kind of money is being provided. Developing countries increasingly emphasise grants, concessional finance and non-debt-creating instruments rather than climate investments that increase already significant sovereign debt burdens.
COP30 moved the debate from pledges toward implementation
COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025 took place ten years after the Paris Agreement and was expected to demonstrate whether the world could move from negotiation towards implementation.
The conference adopted 56 decisions by consensus. Among its significant outcomes was the call to triple adaptation finance by 2035 and the adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators, creating a framework for assessing progress towards the Global Goal on Adaptation.
This was particularly important because climate policy had historically concentrated heavily on mitigation—reducing emissions—while many vulnerable communities were already experiencing impacts that could no longer be avoided.
Adaptation is therefore becoming the second pillar of the global climate response.
Countries now need not only cleaner economies but heat-resilient cities, stronger flood protection, drought-resistant agriculture, climate-resilient health systems, early-warning networks and infrastructure designed for increasingly extreme weather.
The 2035 problem
The most worrying part of the global picture appears when political commitments are compared with the emissions reductions demanded by climate science.
According to UNEP’s 2025 Emissions Gap Report, full implementation of currently available NDCs would place projected warming this century at approximately 2.3–2.5°C. Under policies actually in place, the world remains on a trajectory of about 2.8°C.
The difference between those numbers and 1.5°C may appear small, but climatically it is enormous.
UNEP estimates that annual greenhouse-gas emissions would need to be about 55 percent below 2019 levels by 2035 to follow a pathway aligned with 1.5°C. Current pledges would deliver reductions far smaller than that.
The UNFCCC’s assessment of the new generation of national climate plans similarly shows progress but not enough. An update covering NDCs representing a large share of global emissions indicated that implementation would lower global emissions in 2035 compared with 2019, but the reduction remains far below what is required for the Paris temperature objective.
This is the defining climate-policy contradiction of the present decade: countries have more renewable technology, more climate legislation, more financial mechanisms and more scientific knowledge than ever before, but global action is still not occurring at the speed demanded by the climate system.
The world may temporarily cross 1.5°C
Perhaps the most significant shift in the climate debate is that temporary exceedance of the 1.5°C threshold is increasingly regarded as extremely difficult to avoid.
UNEP’s September 2026 assessment on climate overshoot states that under current policies and near-term trajectories, exceedance of 1.5°C is now widely considered unavoidable. The task therefore becomes limiting how far temperatures rise above the threshold, how long the overshoot lasts and whether global temperatures can eventually be brought downward again.
This does not mean the 1.5°C objective has become irrelevant.
Quite the opposite.
Every additional fraction of warming matters. A world that peaks around 1.6°C is fundamentally different from one approaching 2°C, 2.5°C or 3°C in terms of heat extremes, water stress, ecosystem damage, sea-level rise and the ability of societies to adapt.
Climate diplomacy is therefore moving from the idea of simply “avoiding 1.5°C” toward preventing temporary overshoot from becoming permanent and uncontrolled warming.
COP31: Antalya becomes the next test
Attention is now turning to COP31, scheduled to take place in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to November 20, 2026.
Unlike earlier conferences that could announce new long-term visions, COP31 faces growing pressure to demonstrate implementation.
Countries will increasingly be judged not only on speeches or net-zero dates, but on measurable outcomes: how many gigawatts of renewable power are being installed, how quickly coal dependence is declining, whether methane emissions are falling, whether forests are being protected and whether promised climate finance is reaching vulnerable countries.
The international community will also have to confront the widening connection between climate policy and geopolitics.
Wars, energy-security fears, trade disputes, debt crises and competition for critical minerals are reshaping national priorities. At the same time, renewable energy, battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, green hydrogen and critical minerals are becoming instruments of geopolitical influence.
Climate policy is therefore increasingly inseparable from economic and national-security policy.
From net-zero announcements to measurable delivery
A large number of governments and major corporations have announced net-zero objectives centred around the middle of the century. Many national long-term strategies target net zero between approximately 2040 and 2060, with 2050 remaining the most common target among countries submitting long-term plans.
But net zero in 2050 cannot compensate for unchecked emissions during the 2020s.
Climate science works through cumulative emissions. Carbon dioxide released today remains relevant for decades and centuries. Therefore, the pathway matters as much as the final destination.
The most consequential climate decisions will consequently be those made before 2030 and 2035.
Governments must accelerate renewable-energy deployment, improve energy efficiency, electrify transportation and industry, reduce methane emissions, stop deforestation, reform fossil-fuel subsidies and mobilise finance for poorer economies.
Those actions are less dramatic than announcing a distant net-zero target, but they will determine the actual temperature outcome.
Developing countries cannot be left behind
The credibility of the international climate process will depend heavily on whether poorer and climate-vulnerable countries receive sufficient support.
Countries that contributed relatively little to historic global emissions are often among those facing the greatest exposure to cyclones, floods, salinity intrusion, crop losses, extreme heat and displacement.
For Bangladesh and other climate-vulnerable nations, the international negotiations around adaptation finance, loss and damage, resilient infrastructure and technology transfer therefore have direct economic consequences.
The success of international climate policy cannot be measured only by how quickly wealthy countries install solar panels or electric vehicles. It must also be measured by whether vulnerable populations gain access to resilient housing, clean energy, safe water, disaster protection and economic opportunities.
Climate justice must ultimately become visible in national budgets and community-level investment.
The next decade will decide far more than the conferences themselves
The history of international environmental negotiations shows that conferences can establish goals, create financial mechanisms and generate political pressure. They cannot substitute for domestic implementation.
Paris established the temperature objective. Dubai provided a clearer direction for the global energy transition. Baku placed climate finance at the centre of the negotiations. Belém strengthened the focus on implementation and adaptation.
Antalya will inherit all of those unfinished responsibilities.
The world has therefore moved beyond the stage where the primary problem is a lack of climate targets. Governments already have dozens of them: 2030 emissions targets, 2035 NDCs, renewable-energy goals, adaptation objectives and mid-century net-zero commitments.
The central environmental question of 2026 is whether those promises can survive contact with economic and political reality.
The climate system will not measure the number of declarations signed at international conferences. It will respond to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
For global leaders, that leaves an increasingly simple test.
The age of climate promises has already arrived. The age of climate delivery must begin now.
Author: Environmental Analyst, Founder of Green Time News Network, and President of the Future Flare Foundation.