A ninety-minute delay and a finance fight opened COP31; Türkiye’s own paper showed only Kurum’s speech

Full analysis

What happened Why it matters How each country tells it Where accounts conflict Room for disagreement Our assessment Sources and evidence

What happened

COP31 opened in Antalya on the morning of 9 November ninety minutes late, and no explanation was given for the delay — a detail carried only by the Associated Press account published in Saudi-owned Arab News. When the ceremony in the 1.1-million-square-meter Antalya COP31 site finally began before what Türkiye Gazetesi describes as 195 countries, the summit’s two presidents appeared together: Türkiye’s environment minister Murat Kurum, the COP president, and Australia’s climate minister Chris Bowen, who leads the negotiations under an arrangement that settled a hosting dispute between the two countries. Arab News reports they raised their clasped hands above their heads to applause; Türkiye Gazetesi’s account of the same morning mentions the opening announcement by Kurum alone and does not name Bowen.

The delay followed a late-night fight over money. Arab News, citing Greenpeace’s COP31 delegation head Jasper Inventor and a source familiar with the talks, reports that developing countries had been locked in discussions until late Sunday demanding that climate finance be included on the official agenda. Inventor called it "a difficult start." The source said the climate finance work programme would be on the agenda, but that African countries’ push for a separate item on tripling adaptation finance failed; it would be discussed under other items instead. A senior EU official had warned the previous week, Arab News adds, that there would be "no political will" for new funding pledges at COP31.

Kurum’s speech, transcribed at length by Türkiye Gazetesi, declared that "the word has run out" and called on every country to "establish a historic cooperation in Antalya." He said the presidency would center the voices of the most vulnerable, and that delay carries one of the heaviest costs in climate action, a line Arab News also carries. Affari Italiani quotes him saying this is "the first COP in which it appears clear, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the world will exceed the 1.5-degree limit," and that rather than new targets he would focus on turning existing commitments into action.

The Turkish presidency’s flagship is the 35-by-35 pledge: a voluntary invitation to raise electricity’s share of global final energy consumption from about 20 percent to 35 percent by 2035. Premium Times stresses it sits in the presidency’s voluntary action agenda, not the negotiated track, so joining creates no treaty obligation. It is already contested: Kathimerini, carrying Reuters, reports that climate advocates criticize the pledge for not requiring the added electricity to come from low-carbon sources, while Arab News says the European Union wants the word "clean" attached — a debate over the role of oil, gas and coal.

The summit meets after a year of disaster. Kathimerini reports 2026 is on course to rank among the four hottest years on record because of a strong El Niño, and that a glacier collapse in Nepal caused a flood that killed more than 1,450 people, with thousands still missing; the same account lists lethal heatwaves in Western Europe. Arab News adds major wildfires in Indonesia. A UN Environment Programme report published in October, Kathimerini says, puts the planet on course to overshoot the 1.5-degree warming limit set in Paris in 2015.

The political backdrop is thinned. The United States has no official government delegation: Premium Times specifies it formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January 2026, and Arab News notes a Democratic congressional delegation will nonetheless attend after last week’s US midterm result. Affari Italiani, citing the Guardian for the European names, reports that Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Mark Carney are all absent. The war involving Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz and pushed up global fuel prices, Kathimerini and Affari Italiani report; Kathimerini says this has emboldened defenders of fossil fuels, citing former Obama science adviser John Holdren of Harvard.

Behind the ceremony sit questions carried over from earlier summits. COP28 in Dubai in 2023 produced the first agreement to transition away from fossil fuels; COP30 in Belém in 2025 ended with no explicit fossil-fuel mention and a voluntary roadmap instead. COP29 in Baku set the $300 billion annual developed-country finance goal by 2035, alongside a broader $1.3 trillion ambition from all sources; Premium Times warns the two figures are not interchangeable. UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell told the opening that progress is "far from being sufficiently fast" and that the urgency "must push us into action," Kathimerini reports.

Why it matters

For developing economies, the agenda fight is the substance of the summit. Premium Times argues the unresolved questions are who pays and how fast countries move off fossil fuels, and that for Nigeria the stakes are electricity access, flood management, climate-resilient agriculture and concessional finance that private capital will not supply alone. Nigeria arrives with an updated climate commitment targeting an absolute cut of 168.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030, but the outlet notes the target depends on investment Antalya has not yet produced, and the failure to win a separate adaptation-finance agenda item constrains how much the money question can deliver.

The gap between pledges and physics has widened measurably. The UNEP report Kathimerini cites shows current national pledges would cut emissions only 11 to 15 percent below 2025 levels by 2035, against the 45 percent a 1.5-degree return path requires, according to Premium Times. The disasters that opened the summit are the consequence of that gap.

The host’s paper frames COP31 as Türkiye’s first time hosting the world’s most important climate organization and a moment when the world’s road map will emerge in decisions affecting energy investment, production costs and future generations. Affari Italiani frames it oppositely, as a summit weakened before it begins by the absence of the biggest polluters and major European leaders. The joint presidency itself carries risk: both Türkiye and Australia, Affari Italiani notes, have been criticized for heavy coal dependence, and the "implementation COP" branding Arab News reports is itself a way of lowering expectations from the outset.

How each country tells it

• 🇹🇷
  Türkiye Gazetesi · Turkey · original reporting

  Domestic host-country coverage that treats COP31 as Türkiye’s first climate summit and a national roadmap moment, built almost entirely around Murat Kurum’s opening speech.
• 🇬🇷
  Kathimerini · Greece · wire copy

  Reuters-wire framing of a dramatic appeal to governments, foregrounding Simon Stiell’s call for urgency and the energy disputes around the Turkish electrification pledge.
• 🇳🇬
  Premium Times · Nigeria · opinion

  An analytical preview that treats COP31 as a test of climate finance, fossil-fuel transition and energy ambition for developing economies, with detailed Nigerian stakes.
• 🇸🇦
  Arab News · Saudi Arabia · wire copy

  A wire-service account of leaders under pressure, built around an early fight over climate finance and the oil-price and geopolitical context.
• 🇮🇹
  Affari Italiani · Italy · opinion

  An Italian synthesis that leads on the absent major polluters, Trump, Xi, Modi, Macron, Merz and Carney, and the Iran war’s oil shock, treating the summit’s authority as undermined.

Where accounts conflict

Two points of fact divide the accounts. Kathimerini’s translated Reuters text describes the opening of "the two-day regular conference of the UN," while Premium Times and Affari Italiani both date the talks 9 to 20 November and Arab News calls it "the UN’s annual two-week climate conference." The two-week figure is the majority account and matches the established COP calendar; the "two-day" phrasing appears only in Kathimerini’s Greek rendering of its wire source, but it is what that outlet published.

The second is the date of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Premium Times says the country formally withdrew in January 2026. Affari Italiani writes that Trump withdrew the United States at the time of his inauguration for a second term in January 2025. The treaty’s one-year notice period can reconcile the two — a January 2025 notification takes effect in January 2026 — but the articles date different acts, the announcement versus the formal withdrawal, and neither explains the mechanism.

Room for disagreement

The strongest case that COP31 will exceed the low expectations it opened with is procedural. Arab News reports the climate finance work programme was, in the end, placed on the official agenda — the developing countries’ core demand. Once it is there, wealthy nations cannot so easily avoid discussing how they should provide funds, and the EU’s no-political-will warning was delivered the previous week, before the opening fight. Kurum and Bowen have so far, by Arab News’s account, demonstrated cooperation rather than friction. Stiell’s line, quoted by Affari Italiani, that every recent COP has made fundamental progress, points to incremental gains as the realistic floor. Lula arrives in Antalya fresh from re-election, which Arab News says activists hail as a climate victory, and a Democratic US congressional delegation will be present. Working-level negotiators have already forced finance onto the agenda; their leverage does not depend on heads of government.