COP31 in Antalya:
How far beyond 1.5C will the world go?
When delegates arrived in Antalya, Türkiye, this week for COP31, the UN Climate Change Conference, they met in the year the world stopped pretending we can still meet the Paris Agreement’s key target. In October, the UN Environment Program (UNEP), in its Emissions Gap Report 2026, concluded that limiting warming to 1.5C (2.7F) with no or limited overshoot is no longer possible. The question now is how far we overshoot and for how long.
A decade of delay
The main cause is a decade of delay. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 1.5C pathways assumed cuts from 2020 that never materialized. The Global Carbon Project estimates that fossil carbon dioxide emissions hit a record 38.1 gigatons in 2025. The UN climate change secretariat's 2026 synthesis of national climate plans finds that the new pledges, fully implemented, would leave 2035 emissions just 6% to 9% below 2019 levels, where those pathways required a cut of around 60%.
Recent geopolitical instability has pulled climate policy in two directions simultaneously. The 2022 gas crisis and this year's Hormuz closure, which the International Energy Agency (IEA) called the largest supply disruption in the oil market's history, made renewables look like the more energy secure option for importers.
Where the world ends up depends on which promises count. Policies in force point, on UNEP’s estimate, to about 2.8C (5.04F) of warming this century, with temperatures still climbing after 2100. The UN climate change secretariat’s central estimates put the new pledges on their own at 2.1 to 3.2C (3.78-5.76F) by 2100, and at 1.7 to 2.3C (3.06-4.14F) if governments also deliver the mid-century net zero targets that current policy comes nowhere near.
The task in Antalya is to keep the peak as low and as brief as possible. Every tenth of a degree, and every year above 1.5C, matters. UNEP's lowest-overshoot scenario peaks at 1.7 to 1.8C (3.06-32.4F) around mid-century, and each five years at today's emissions rate locks in roughly another tenth of a degree.
The task in Antalya is to keep the peak as low and as brief as possible. Every tenth of a degree, and every year above 1.5C, matters
Global warming twice as fast in the Middle East
The Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region is warming almost twice as fast as the global average, so each of those global figures arrives here larger. The difference between a peak near 1.7C (3.06F) and a drift toward 2.8C (5.04F) is the difference between heat and water stress that societies can still adapt to and conditions that overwhelm them, and some losses, such as land lost to the sea in low-lying deltas, would not come back even if temperatures later fell.
Electrifying energy use with wind and solar does most of the work. Alongside it must come a managed phase-down of fossil fuels, starting with coal in electricity, with advanced economies moving fastest and each country publishing a national transition roadmap. The pledges show how far there is to go. Nearly three years after governments agreed in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels, the UN climate change secretariat finds that only one in 10 new plans sets a target to cut fossil-fired power by 2035, and only one in 20 commits to phasing out coal power by then. The host is a test case: Türkiye added a record 6.5 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar in 2025, yet coal still supplied 34% of its electricity.
Methane is the quickest lever, because cuts register in temperatures within years. The IEA's Global Methane Tracker estimates that around 70% of fossil fuel methane, nearly 85 million tons, could be abated with existing technology. Energy-sector methane showed no sign of falling in 2025, and the IEA reckons that capturing what now leaks would make roughly 200 billion cubic meters of gas a year available for sale, an argument the agency itself made in the middle of this year’s crisis.
All of this depends on turning the 2035 national plans into policy, using the second Global Stocktake, which concludes in 2028, to judge progress, and moving finance to emerging economies. The International Court of Justice advised in 2025 that 1.5C is the Paris Agreement's primary temperature goal and that national plans, taken together, must be capable of meeting it.
COP31 in Antalya will matter if it ends with dates attached to coal and methane commitments. The 1.5C line has already been crossed in individual months and years, and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service now expects the long-term average to follow before the end of this decade. What remains open is how far above it the world goes, and for how long, and few places will feel the answer sooner than the region hosting the talks.
COP31 in Antalya will matter if it ends with dates attached to coal and methane commitments.
