COP31 Prelude: Global South pushes climate finance and fair trade over new targets

The annual UN climate conference, COP31, will be held in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to 20. Countries will negotiate issues including just transition, climate finance, adaptation and mitigation. 

The Turkish presidency has also proposed a global electrification target. Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) called it a “low-hanging fruit with high-hanging costs” for the developing world. The “35-by-35” goal aims to raise electricity’s share of final energy demand from just over 20% today to 35% by 2035. Developing countries face weaker grids, financially stressed utilities, higher borrowing costs and limited capacity to invest in new technologies and equipment. The target will need finance and infrastructure support, especially in Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, the think-tank said. 

The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report 2026 is also out., It finds that global warming is set to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The report says urgent emissions cuts are needed to limit the magnitude and duration of the overshoot and return to 1.5°C by the end of the century. It warns: “Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C raises climate risks.”

The report is expected to feature in COP31 discussions as countries continue to break temperature records. In 2024, global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in a calendar year. This does not, by itself, mean the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal has been breached, which is assessed over a longer period. More than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels; the rest includes CO₂ from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases (F-gases), the report said.

CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels continued to rise in 2025. India’s emissions fell compared with 2024, partly due to “structural shifts towards renewables”, UNEP said in its Emissions Gap Report, as reported by The Times of India. India remains the world’s third-largest emitter, behind China and the United States.

Climate change: Unequal energy use and the question of fairness

The 2015 Paris Agreement recognises the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC), reflecting countries’ different historical contributions to climate change and their capacity to respond. Developing countries continue to argue that richer nations have not met their climate-finance obligations. Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, speaking at the Berlin Global Dialogue, said developed countries had promised $100 billion annually to help developing countries address climate change but they failed to meet the goal for over a decade. And that the EU's taxonomy under Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) ignores CBDR principles of fairness as it imposes a high carbon tax on trade with developing countries. 

India’s broader message is that COP31 should reinforce existing commitments, particularly those linked to finance and other support for implementation, rather than become a venue for new obligations. India has said the Global Stocktake should not become a channel for new mitigation duties or sector-specific prescriptions outside the UNFCCC process, ET Climate reported. 

Speaking at a special event convened by the president of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Soumya Nair, counsellor at India’s Permanent Mission to the UN, said climate cooperation must be assessed through the lens of fairness. She said countries face different development realities and cannot be expected to follow identical pathways. She also said the climate regime would lose credibility if targets expanded rhetorically while finance, technology and capacity-building needed to execute them remained inadequate. 

India would prioritise predictable climate finance, party-driven and non-punitive mitigation outcomes, voluntary adaptation indicators that do not condition access to finance, technology transfer and a just transition, India’s union minister for environment, forest and climate change, Bhupender Yadav, said in a November 3 statement. The statement also said India would oppose new top-down targets and argue that voluntary initiatives under the COP31 presidency’s Action Agenda remain separate from negotiations, while uniform global targets must reflect national circumstances.

India’s strongest ask was for developed countries to honour their climate-finance commitments under the Paris Agreement. According to Nair’s intervention, the Article 9.1 work programme should first settle the scope and modalities of those obligations. She said Article 6 cooperation could mobilise additional resources, but could not replace finance that developed countries are expected to provide.

Nair cautioned against unilateral measures such as CBAM, saying they risk transferring the costs of historical emissions onto developing economies. This reflects a wider concern among Global South countries that climate policy is increasingly linked to trade rules in ways that could penalise countries still building their energy systems and industrial base.

Former UN diplomat Mukul Sanwal wrote in The Hindu that India should “reframe” climate change “as a set of national crises arising from unequal energy use, rather than as a global temperature goal driven by emissions”.

COP31: Trade in the spotlight

Trade measures that impose tariffs and penalties on cleantech and emissions-intensive goods are poised to re-emerge as a challenging issue after China signalled it wants COP31 to focus on ensuring the free flow of green technologies. 

China dominates global manufacturing of clean technology equipment, but its exports face tariffs and other restrictions in the United States and European Union. Washington and Brussels argue that some Chinese products benefit from unfair government subsidies and threaten domestic industries. Beijing says such measures restrict access to affordable technologies needed for the energy transition. 

China and the EU recently pledged climate cooperation on the sidelines of the biodiversity COP17 in Armenia, discussing biodiversity conservation, plastic pollution and COP31, China Daily reported. BJX News reported that the EU repealed anti-dumping and countervailing duties on imports of solar glass from China. Bloomberg reported that the EU had reached a deal with China on hybrid cars and was looking at other sectors for negotiations. The South China Morning Post reported that Chinese electric vehicle production in Europe helped drive a 46% rise in China’s lithium-ion battery exports to the EU from January to September. Chinese wind-turbine makers are also expanding in Europe, the Financial Times reported.

COP31 should address climate finance for developing countries as well as the “new problem” of unilateralism and protectionism, said Li Gao, vice-minister of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, Reuters reported.

“We believe the conference should discuss in depth the old problems of developed countries’ insufficient emission reductions and insufficient financial support, as well as the new problem of unilateralism and protectionism undermining global collective efforts,” Li said. He also called for a roadmap to deliver the 2024 pledge to raise $300 billion in annual climate finance for developing countries, as per the Reuters report.

Adaptation: Unpredictable finance, growing climate risks

China’s environment minister Huang Runqiu pledged to advance “green development cooperation” under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) at the Belt and Road Green Innovation Conference in Hong Kong, China Daily reported. China signed more than 80 cooperation documents with over 50 countries to align green strategies and expand technology cooperation backed by green investment and finance, the newspaper reported. A report released at the conference said countries in the Global South face “major obstacles” to climate adaptation.

India recognised heatwaves as natural disasters three months before COP31. The move highlights the challenge for countries that must fund immediate adaptation while international finance remains difficult to access. “This task would have been much simpler if we had a good amount of international assistance that allowed us to access funds for various heat adaptation measures,” Krishna S Vatsa, a member of the National Disaster Management Authority, told PTI.

Vatsa said adaptation resources were “inadequate and unpredictable” and called for better access to technologies, including those needed for efficient cooling.

India’s first Adaptation Communication to the UN climate process, submitted in 2023, estimated that the country would need to spend Rs 56.68 trillion on adaptation by 2030.

Adaptation finance helps communities prepare for and cope with climate impacts. According to the Economic Survey 2025, 98% of India’s adaptation finance comes from domestic sources.

The gap between what developing countries need to adapt to a hotter world and the finance that reaches them is expected to feature prominently at COP31 in Antalya.

Hope and Despair 

Brazil’s re-election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has raised hopes that the country can meet its target of ending deforestation by 2030 and advance international fundraising to protect rainforests. The Associated Press quoted Brazilian scientist David Lapola as saying: “The Amazon can breathe a sigh of relief.” Bloomberg said Lula’s defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro would maintain Brazil’s prominent role in UN climate talks. 

The issue is not limited to island nations and developing countries seeking climate finance. Climate science itself faces a funding and scheduling impasse. The Financial Times reported that the IPCC was “in limbo” after countries failed to approve its budget. The report added, “The stranglehold on funding for the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of hundreds of international experts, comes after a failure to resolve a three-year deadlock over when the next research should be delivered.” The article said the budget was not approved at a meeting in Ethiopia in October, where “attendees [said] the IPCC was being held hostage to the discussions about the publication timeline”. 

India has opposed bringing the IPCC’s seventh assessment report (AR7) forward to meet the 2028 Global Stocktake timetable, arguing that a compressed schedule could undermine the reports’ rigour and leave too little time for scientists and governments in the Global South to participate. In a Frontline interview, climate policy experts T. Jayaraman and Tejal Kanitkar, both of whom have served on India’s IPCC delegations, said the assessment needs enough time for expert and government reviews, for authors to respond to comments, and for peer-reviewed research from the Global South to be represented. They also argued that the IPCC’s role is broader than informing a single Global Stocktake and that its report cycle should follow scientific and procedural needs. 

The November 3 statement by India’s union environment minister on India’s COP31 priorities similarly said the Global Stocktake should remain party-driven, facilitative and non-punitive, respect nationally determined contributions and not create new top-down targets.

 

[Edit: Bhasker Tripathi, Production: Arkatapa Basu]