November 2026 Policy Newsletter Essay
It’s November which means we are once again gearing up for the next UN Climate Conference, COP31, taking place this year in Antalya, Türkiye from the 9 th -20 th of this month. In his 4th letter to the Parties, COP31 President-Designate, Minister Murat Kurum, reflected on the moment in which we find ourselves: “As countries move into the second decade of the Paris Agreement, our focus must be delivery. This means working together and helping countries to translate NDCs and NAPs into policies, development plans and investable projects, supported by stronger enabling environments, capacity and access to finance.”
To this end, the Turkish and Australian governments, co-hosts of this year’s COP, have framed the conference around the broad theme of implementation. Implementation, Minister Kurum wrote, is the “ultimate test” of whether the Paris Agreement succeeds or fails.
This begs the question: ten years into the Paris Agreement, how are countries doing on implementation thus far? If you read the first Global Stocktake (GST) report or the most recent NDC synthesis report, the answer is: not great. The next GST begins this year and will be finalized in 2028. It’s likely that report will find continued progress, but that Parties will still fall short of their targets.
Does that mean, then, that the Paris Agreement has failed? Absolutely not. Every fraction of every degree of warming that we shave off our current trajectory matters. Every successful adaptation project implemented to protect local communities from increased sea level rise or wildfire risk matters. Better policies are important, so to better engineering standards.
Fundamentally, these reports do not give a complete picture of the massive transformation underway. Such transformations do not happen overnight; they will not happen as quickly as you or I would like. Change is not a linear process and we are learning in real time how the effects of climate change rewrite what we thought we knew about the utility of early warning systems or the impacts of drought on groundwater storage.
What has failed to adapt are our multilateral institutions themselves. Now that the Paris Agreement has been fully negotiated, what is the utility of the annual COP? As negotiated outcomes of any kind become more difficult at the global level, how can we transform our institutions to better support the implementation of what has already been adopted?
This year’s breakdown in negotiations over the next phase of the Global Goal on Adaptation is instructive. At the SB, Parties were unable to find enough common ground to agree to the appointment of technical experts to support the finalization of the voluntary GGA indicators Parties barely managed to adopt at COP last year.
Meanwhile, governments are simply getting on with it, albeit, with less technical and financial support than they would like. Like in the fossil fuels phase-out negotiations, Parties are looking outside the Convention for ways to take action.
Of course, there is a risk in moving away from negotiated outcomes which require consensus, as the outcomes will not be universally adopted or implemented. However, in the absence of consensus, there may be no better alternative than building coalitions of the willing.
And that brings us to the issue of the annual COPs. If the negotiations are now more focused on the technical work of implementing the Paris Agreement, what then is the purpose of these enormous annual conferences? Should they still take place annually? Or at all? And if so, how can they adapt to changing political and economic realities, to make them fit for purpose in 2026, 2036, and beyond?
Simultaneously, budgets for the UNFCCC Secretariat have been shrinking for years and the staff that remains are asked to do more and more with less and less. Could the Secretariat be transformed into a more technically oriented support unit, focused less on convening and running the Convention itself and more on supporting the Parties with implementation? Or should they stick to running the Convention and let other organizations handle the technical support to Parties?
The COP31 Presidency has signaled willingness to engage with Parties and the UNFCCC to advance a reform agenda; to that end, the Presidency has said they will continue to hold consultations with Parties to collect additional views on how the UNFCCC can better support them with implementation.
While calls for UNFCCC reform are growing louder, so too is the recognition that there are multiple pathways to a climate resilient future – not all have to go through the consensus-based processes of the UNFCCC. As I’ve said many times before, I’m a “both – and” kind of person. I think a credible case remains to be made for retaining a regular conference schedule. It keeps climate change on the political agenda, Parties are able to meet, learn from one another, and celebrate the progress they are making. These conferences are also increasingly important for non-state actors, like AGWA, who use these events to connect to government partners, share our work, and, ideally, support the acceleration of implementation on the ground.
But with over 80k people, on average, now participating each year, and with an increasingly bloated agenda, it’s impossible for negotiators and delegates to thoughtfully engage, as their time is dissected into increasingly smaller chunks. If we are truly serious about implementation, the focus should shift from the global to regional and national levels. So yes, keep the conference, but focus it around reporting on progress, new commitments, and taking stock. Technical experts can engage with Parties to share and learn, without the pressure of mandates and work programmes. Issues related to climate finance should be included as a component of all the major workstreams, rather than constantly creating new, competing funds with increasingly elaborate and complicated mechanisms that do nothing to direct financial flows to the communities that need them most. Because communities are where implementation happens.
The COP31 Co-Presidents are right to emphasize implementation, but the COP, as a global conference, is not the best vehicle for catalyzing local action. For that, we need to look beyond these annual conferences, to what’s happening regionally, nationally, and sub-nationally.
Initiatives like the Water Resilience Tracker are doing just that. COP is a useful venue for showcasing our work, but equally – if not more – important are basin conferences and regional climate weeks, because that is where we connect with the real implementers. For now, we remain committed to attending COP to ensure representation for water in the global climate agenda, but we are also adjusting our own COP strategy to better meet the needs of the age of implementation by focusing more on where we started: building resilience from the bottom up by engaging with cities, countries, and regions through our programmes and partners – including many of you!
Just in the last few weeks, AGWA joined two new (for us) implementation-focused groups: the FAO-led Fast Partnership and the NAP Implementation Alliance. We’ll be sharing more about how we plan to contribute to both over the coming months so please stay tuned. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing many of you in Antalya.
Ingrid Timboe
Deputy Executive Director and Senior Policy Lead
Portland, Oregon, USA
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