COP31 Presidency's Energy Ministerial Meeting in Antalya

COP31 Leaders’ Summit: 100+ World Leaders Back Electrification, Green Industry and Zero Waste in Antalya

November 12, 2026 Faizan Altaf

More than 100 world leaders gathered in Antalya, Türkiye, for the COP31 Leaders’ Summit, the high-level heart of the United Nations climate conference. With electrification, green industry and zero waste at the top of the agenda, the summit was designed to give fresh political energy to climate talks that will run until 20 November.

The COP31 Leaders’ Summit brings together heads of state and government to set the political direction for the negotiations that follow. According to Türkiye’s Anadolu Agency, 102 leaders representing 95 countries and seven international organisations were expected to attend. UN Secretary-General António Guterres joined them, along with presidents, prime ministers and vice-presidents from every region of the world.

The message from the opening day was clear: climate action is no longer being sold only as a way to save the planet. Leaders framed it as a way to cut energy bills, create jobs, strengthen economies and protect countries from the price shocks of imported fossil fuels.

What happened on day one in Antalya

The COP31 conference opened on 9 November at the Antalya EXPO Center, and the Leaders’ Summit runs across 11 and 12 November. Day one focused on three big themes: electrification, green industrialisation and zero waste.

Host nation President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opened the proceedings with a call for what he described as civilisational accountability on climate. “Respect for nature lies at the heart of our civilization. Earth is a sacred trust that must be protected and cared for,” he told world leaders. “This culture, which considers bread as fertility, water as holy, and a tree as life, serves as our compass in our environmental and climate policies.”

Erdoğan said Türkiye was working to become part of the solution rather than the problem, and pointed to the country’s own National Energy Plan, published earlier in November 2026, which sets out decarbonisation pathways for energy, industry, transport and agriculture.

Not every major leader was in the room. US President Donald Trump did not attend, and the United States is staying away from the conference for a second consecutive year after Trump withdrew the world’s top historical greenhouse gas emitter from international climate cooperation. Chinese President Xi Jinping was represented by Vice-President Han Zheng. Among the leaders who did attend were Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine.

Electrification: the push to reach 35 per cent by 2035

The centrepiece of the summit’s first day was electrification — the shift from burning fossil fuels to running economies on clean electricity. Erdoğan hosted a leader-level event on electrification alongside UN Secretary-General Guterres, aimed at mapping the opportunities and the barriers to speeding up the global energy transition.

Türkiye, which holds the COP31 presidency, is promoting a target to raise electricity’s share of global final energy demand from just over one-fifth today to 35 per cent by 2035. The “35-by-2035” goal is the flagship initiative of the COP31 Presidency’s Action Agenda, and it was the main talking point of the summit’s opening day.

Why does electrification matter so much? Electricity is the easiest form of energy to make clean. A car that runs on electricity can be powered by sunshine or wind; a car that runs on petrol cannot. The same is true for heating homes and running factories.

The summit also built on an earlier COP31 agreement to put rooftop solar on 300 million homes by 2030, a plan backed by participating countries in the conference’s first days. For countries such as Pakistan, where rooftop solar has already grown rapidly, electrification is not a distant idea — it is already happening on rooftops across the country.

The Green Industrialisation Compact

The COP31 Presidency also hosted a leader-level event on green industrialisation, building political support for the Antalya Green Industrialisation Compact. The compact is designed to speed up investment in near-zero and low-emissions industrial production — in plain terms, making steel, cement, chemicals and other heavy products without the heavy pollution.

Industry accounts for about a quarter of direct global carbon dioxide emissions, so cleaning it up is one of the biggest single challenges in the fight against climate change. The compact focuses on two main tools: industrial electrification, meaning powering factories with clean electricity instead of coal and gas, and greater use of circular materials, meaning reusing and recycling materials instead of always making new ones.

COP31 President Murat Kurum made the case for aligning climate action with national economic interest. “Using energy more efficiently makes energy supplies more secure. Investing in water strengthens food security. Clean technologies create opportunities for industry and employment. Resilient cities strengthen our economies. Well-designed climate action is an investment in prosperity, security and competitiveness,” he said.

That argument — that climate action pays for itself — ran through the whole first day of the summit.

Zero waste takes centre stage

The third big theme of the day was waste. First Lady of Türkiye Emine Erdoğan addressed a leader-level event on Zero Waste, a thematic priority of the COP31 Presidency. The session focused on reducing the projected growth in global municipal solid waste by at least 50 per cent by 2035, and raising the global circular material use rate to at least 15 per cent.

The waste sector matters more to the climate than most people realise. It is responsible for roughly 20 per cent of human-caused methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas considered about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over comparable timescales, although it stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter time.

Running alongside the Zero Waste event, the COP31 Presidency hosted a Global High-Level Dialogue on Methane Emissions from the Waste Sector, aimed at identifying concrete policies and bankable projects to drive down methane output.

The COP31 High-Level Champion also launched the #OneBillion Challenge, aiming to mobilise one billion people, households, businesses, cities and organisations to reduce food waste. The initiative is supported by the Zero Waste Foundation and is designed to turn small everyday actions into measurable results.

A new sales pitch: climate action as cheaper living

Beyond the formal announcements, the most striking feature of the summit was a change in language. Leaders at COP31 are trying out a new way of talking about climate action: do it to strengthen the economy and bring down the cost of living.

The message reflects the reality that governments are wrestling with crises — wars, inflation and energy shocks — that have pushed global warming down the list of priorities.

UN Secretary-General Guterres put the argument bluntly to world leaders on Wednesday. “Three-quarters of humanity live in countries that import fossil fuels, hostage to price shocks they did not create and cannot control,” he said. “Recent conflicts make clear that this is a recipe for chronic insecurity and a cost-of-living meltdown.” The clear solution, he said, is a shift to renewable energy.

Simon Stiell, head of the UN’s climate office, made the same point. “Today, chaos in global energy markets and climate disasters are supercharging inflation, slamming government budgets, pushing household bills up and living standards down,” he told the conference. “The political costs of fossil fuel dependency are unforgiving. Climate action can help relieve the pressures.”

John Kerry, the former US secretary of state who has advocated for climate action for decades, said he liked the reframing. “I think everybody who is working on climate needs to change the way they talk about it,” Kerry told reporters on the sidelines of the summit. “I think that grouping of security, health, jobs, stability of communities and food supply are all very real and very much on people’s minds when I talk to them.”

European energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen said emphasising the other benefits of cutting emissions could help build a consensus that includes even climate sceptics. “Because even if you don’t believe in climate change, which I obviously do, we should be able to agree that moving away from a dependency on fossils is extremely smart for security reasons,” he said.

Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar reminded the summit that the science still comes first. “It is our responsibility to turn scientific evidence into political action and ensure that our decisions are guided by fact, not short-term political interests,” she said.

The money: a record $1.6 billion deal for Türkiye

Big speeches need big money behind them, and the summit delivered a concrete deal. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) agreed a record $1.6 billion financing deal with Türkiye, the COP31 host, to support policy reforms aimed at attracting the investment the country needs to hit its climate goals.

Türkiye will need an estimated $68 billion in additional climate investment by 2030, around half of it from private sources, the bank said. The agreement will support the implementation of Türkiye’s Climate Law and its plan to cut planet-warming emissions, which includes an interim target for 2035 and aims to achieve net zero by 2053.

“This financing represents AIIB’s largest climate policy-based financing package to date, and we look forward to contributing to Türkiye delivering on its climate ambitions,” said AIIB Chief Investment Officer Konstantin Limitovskiy. Total AIIB climate financing in 2025 was a record $7.47 billion.

Part of the money will help Türkiye scale up its new emissions trading scheme, under which companies in high-emitting sectors receive and trade pollution allowances. A domestic carbon price could also help Turkish exporters to the European Union in sectors such as steel and cement, because carbon costs paid in Türkiye can be taken into account under the bloc’s carbon border levy.

The programme’s targets include getting at least 180 facilities reporting baseline emissions under the scheme by April 2027, securing production licences for 1,800 megawatts of wind and solar capacity by early 2027, helping 225,000 farmers in water-stressed basins switch to less water-intensive crops by 2028, and designating 50,000 hectares of land as carbon sinks — areas where land absorbs climate-damaging carbon — by 2028.

What it means for Pakistan

Pakistan has a direct stake in everything discussed in Antalya. The country is among the most climate-vulnerable in the world, and its prime minister used the summit to press the case for finance. Shehbaz Sharif told a high-level clean-energy session at COP31 that Pakistan needs about $188 billion by 2035 — $138 billion for low-carbon power generation and another $50 billion to replace coal-based power with solar energy — and urged international partners to provide concessional financing and affordable technology.

He also pointed to what Pakistan has already done: clean energy now accounts for nearly 55 per cent of the country’s energy mix, and 22,000 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity has been added in just two years. That record gives Pakistan credibility when it argues for the electrification agenda that dominated the summit’s first day.

The summit’s focus on methane and waste also matters for Pakistan, where unmanaged waste and agricultural emissions are major sources of the gas. And the new framing of climate action as a way to cut living costs speaks directly to a country where energy prices and inflation dominate daily life.

For readers who want the full picture of Pakistan’s case at the summit, see our earlier coverage of Shehbaz Sharif’s $188 billion climate finance appeal and the COP31 plan to put rooftop solar on 300 million homes by 2030.

What happens next

The Leaders’ Summit sets the political temperature, but it is only the start. The technical negotiations continue in Antalya until the conference closes on 20 November, and the real test will be whether the summit’s rhetoric turns into binding commitments and finance pledges.

A dedicated Finance and Trade focus is scheduled for 13 November, highlighting how investment and trade rules affect the speed and fairness of the energy transition. Delegates will also have to grapple with the findings of the UN Environment Programme’s 2026 Emissions Gap Report, which says global warming is expected to exceed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels.

Observers note that the scale of participation on day one signals political will, but outcomes will ultimately be judged on the specificity and accountability of any agreements reached before the conference closes.

Frequently asked questions

What is COP31?

COP31 is the 31st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is being held in Antalya, Türkiye, from 9 to 20 November 2026, bringing together nearly 200 countries to negotiate climate action.

What is the COP31 Leaders’ Summit?

The Leaders’ Summit is the high-level segment of COP31, held on 11 and 12 November 2026. More than 100 heads of state and government gathered in Antalya to give political direction to the negotiations on electrification, green industry and waste.

What is the 35-by-2035 electrification target?

It is the COP31 Presidency’s flagship goal to raise electricity’s share of global final energy demand from just over one-fifth today to 35 per cent by 2035, speeding up the shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity.

What is the Antalya Green Industrialisation Compact?

It is a COP31 initiative to accelerate investment in near-zero and low-emissions industrial production. Industry accounts for about a quarter of direct global carbon dioxide emissions, and the compact focuses on industrial electrification and circular materials.

What is the #OneBillion Challenge?

Launched by the COP31 High-Level Champion, it aims to mobilise one billion people and organisations to reduce food waste, supported by the Zero Waste Foundation.

Why is methane from waste a focus at COP31?

The waste sector accounts for about 20 per cent of human-caused methane emissions, and methane is about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Cutting it is one of the fastest near-term ways to limit warming.

Conclusion

The first day of the COP31 Leaders’ Summit showed a climate conference trying to speak a new language. Instead of asking countries to sacrifice for the planet, leaders in Antalya argued that clean electricity, green industry and zero waste are the cheapest, safest and most competitive path forward.

Whether that argument turns into real money and real commitments will be decided in the negotiating rooms over the next eight days. But with more than 100 leaders in the room, a record $1.6 billion deal already signed and a clear set of targets on the table, COP31 has given itself something to be judged against. The world will be watching Antalya until 20 November.

Sources

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.

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