The central heartbeat of every United Nations climate summit is the meticulous, often exhausting negotiation of legal agreements word by word. COP31, hosted in the Turkish coastal city of Antalya, is no exception. Behind the closed doors of the summit’s restricted "blue zone," diplomats and delegates from nearly 200 nations—operating notably without the United States following its exit from the UNFCCC—gather to debate individual verbs, punctuation marks, and binding commitments.

Over the course of the two-week conference, these negotiators must attempt to reach a consensus on more than 100 separate legal and procedural agreements. Before they can even begin to tackle the substantive issues, however, they must first survive the opening procedural battles to agree on what items will make it onto the official agenda. The profound complexity of this process can make it exceptionally difficult for observers, journalists, and even delegates to keep track of what nations are fighting over and how negotiations are progressing day by day.

To help decode this diplomatic labyrinth, specialized tracking tools offer a searchable, real-time record of every document and agenda item across all streams of the negotiations. The initial columns of such interactive trackers typically outline the topic of each agenda item, supplemented by dates, page counts, and direct links to the original documentation. Because parties can suggest late additions to the schedule before proceedings officially kick off, these preliminary phases frequently erupt into what veteran climate watchers call "agenda fights."

A Unique Presidential Partnership and the Pursuit of a Cover Text

This year’s summit carries a distinctive geopolitical twist. While Turkey holds the formal presidency and is hosting COP31 on its soil, Australia is jointly running the operational show as the designated "president of negotiations." This unusual power-sharing arrangement has already shaped the trajectory of the talks.

Ahead of the summit, Turkish and Australian officials announced their shared intention to produce a comprehensive "cover text." This overarching political document is designed to summarize key negotiated outcomes alongside critical issues that failed to secure a spot on the official agenda.

Such a text could explicitly acknowledge the stark scientific reality that global warming is on track to "overshoot" the critical 1.5C limit, while addressing the compounding climate impacts already being felt around the world. Furthermore, the cover text may incorporate ambitious solutions, such as the Turkish presidency’s signature "electrification" target, which aims for 35 percent of global final energy consumption to be sourced directly from electricity by 2035.

Major Topics on the Table at Antalya

Although COP31 falls halfway between two major "global stocktakes" of collective climate progress and is therefore not widely viewed as a milestone year for sweeping new treaty rewrites, there remains a dense roster of major topics up for discussion.

Delegates are tasked with finalizing the operational details of the "global goal on adaptation," determining how to measure and bolster resilience to climate shocks worldwide. They also face a deeply contested debate over whether to continue a specialized work program focused on slashing greenhouse gas emissions, commonly known as the mitigation work programme.

In addition, negotiators are working to establish the operational framework for a new "just transition mechanism," sometimes referred to as the Belém-Antalya mechanism for global just transitions, or BAM. This mechanism is intended to ensure that the global pivot away from fossil fuels does not disproportionately harm vulnerable workforces or developing economies.

Expanding Agendas and Unilateral Trade Measures

While most agenda items are carefully negotiated months in advance, nations retain the right to propose late additions, a prerogative that frequently sparks intense diplomatic friction. At the preceding COP30 summit, parties agreed to place two new items on the agenda for future summits: the provision of climate finance by developed countries under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and the alignment of broader global financial flows with the treaty’s long-term temperature goals under Article 2.1c.

Ahead of the opening of COP31, the African group of nations filed a formal request to add climate-related trade tariffs to the agenda. This push follows an agreement reached at COP30 to hold annual dialogues on unilateral trade measures during the interim Bonn climate talks. The African group is also pressing for additional agenda items focused on tripling adaptation finance and securing sustained funding for the Green Climate Fund, a flagship UN institution designed to finance climate resilience and mitigation in the developing world.

Before the conference formally commenced, tracking systems recorded 104 substantive items on the agenda, excluding routine procedural matters such as the election of COP bureau officials. The overall health and progress of these negotiations can be visualized through a traffic-light status system that categorizes every agenda item based on its current developmental stage.

The Lifecycle of a Negotiating Text

When a topic is coded red, negotiators have not yet managed to produce a written draft, often reflecting fundamentally irreconcilable views among participating blocs. As talks advance into the orange phase, diplomats collaborate on an "informal text"—an early draft that captures the various positions of different countries without employing formal legal language.

Once a draft legal agreement takes shape, the topic transitions to yellow. At this critical juncture, areas of lingering disagreement are explicitly highlighted within the text using square brackets and alternative options. A high density of square brackets is a reliable indicator of deep divisions between negotiating blocs, prompting teams to count and display the number of outstanding brackets in each document.

Throughout the summit, negotiating teams churn through numerous iterations of texts. These drafts may incorporate bridging language engineered by the presidency to resolve ideological standpoints and locate a mutually acceptable landing zone. Agreement on a given topic is officially reached only when every bracket and competing option has been resolved, turning the agenda item green on the status charts.

Where deadlocks prove insurmountable, discussions may be subjected to "rule 16," a procedural mechanism that postpones negotiations on the topic until the subsequent UNFCCC session. These unresolved items are subsequently coded grey.

The Gavel and the Final Plenary

As the summit nears its conclusion and negotiating blocs successfully narrow down options and clear away brackets, they generate "clean" texts containing zero areas of internal disagreement. These clean texts are subsequently converted into formal "draft decisions" ready for formal adoption at the closing plenary session of the meeting.

In theory, this final step is a procedural formality requiring the COP president to strike the gavel, signifying that the text has been officially adopted as a binding legal outcome of the summit. In practice, however, dramatic and high-stakes exceptions can occur. During the closing plenary of COP29, the meeting’s president infamously failed to adopt a crucial deal relating to the global stocktake, which had previously called for the world to transition away from fossil fuels.

As delegations settle into the grueling work in Antalya, the focus remains firmly on whether the delicate architecture of international climate diplomacy can produce actionable results before the final gavel falls.