Ten years after Paris, 1.5C is slipping and Cop31 is split in two

Cop31 opens with a first: one country hosting the talks, another holding the gavel. Turkey runs the summit on the ground while Australia presides — a messy compromise between two governments whose other shared enthusiasm is coal, according to the Guardian. The bigger question hanging over the halls isn't wording or timetables. It's whether the whole Cop machine is still worth the plane fare.

The scoreboard is brutal. Global temperatures have now topped 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for two straight years, and the UN confirmed a few weeks ago that its most optimistic estimate is about 1.7C to 1.8C of heating. Warming is running at 0.4C a decade — double the 0.2C pace when the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. On those numbers, the treaty's central goal looks out of reach.

The process hasn't helped itself. At Cop30 in Belém last year, Brazil's hosts took national emissions-cutting plans off the table, calling them a matter for governments rather than negotiation. A veteran negotiator told the Guardian it would be “a very short Cop” with “nothing to negotiate,” while another diplomat predicted countries simply wouldn't engage with the US out of Paris. It took more than five years just to negotiate the rulebook, and consensus rules have handed petrostates including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela a permanent veto.

Fossil fuels weren't even named directly until Cop28 in Dubai in 2023, more than 30 years after the 1992 UN climate convention — and that agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels” came with no timeframe and no policies. The rich world isn't picking up the slack either: Australia, a Cop31 co-host, has set no end date for fossil fuel exports, Turkey plans to raise its carbon output, the UK is opening a gasfield and weighing a new oilfield, Germany dropped its EV sales targets and scrapped a renewable heating law, and climate finance for poorer countries is shrinking.

Panama's former climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey didn't mince words: commitments “just turned out to be a bunch of hot air,” he said, adding that “under that measure, we have failed.” Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research called a world heading for 2.6C-3C within the Paris framework “nothing but a global failure.” Yet both refuse to write Paris off — Rockström says “Paris is all we have,” and Monterrey calls it “our moral compass.” Former Clinton climate adviser Paul Bledsoe wants the labyrinthine structures streamlined to focus on national emissions goals.

There are flickers of momentum outside the negotiating halls. Nearly 60 countries met in Colombia in April and agreed to draft their own roadmaps for moving off fossil fuels, with France, Germany and the Netherlands already delivering theirs. Bledsoe wants side deals on super pollutants such as methane, where a 40% cut could trim roughly 0.3C off temperatures this decade. Brazil's re-election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva brought the biggest deforestation reductions in decades, and US midterms delivered a drubbing to the right. As Claudio Angelo of the Observatório do Clima put it, Paris's real exhibits are the solar panels on his roof and his neighbour's BYD Dolphin.