COP climate summits might yet have a useful future – here’s how

The COP31 venue in Antalya, TurkeyOrhan Cicek/Anadolu via Getty Images

At a certain point, it becomes impossible to convey the urgency of the climate crisis in words. Calls to “intensify efforts” to cut emissions or countries “expressing alarm” at the pace of climate change start to ring hollow after years of rising emissions. At a certain point, you have to ask, what difference will another carefully worded declaration really make?

This is a live question: next week, countries will gather at the COP31 summit in Antalya, Turkey, to progress the global response to climate change. For the seasoned attendee, these gatherings follow a predictable rhythm: some pomp and ceremony at the start when the world leaders are in attendance, followed by a quiet first week of backroom talks, escalating tension and fights over finance in the second week, all rounded off with a late-night showdown as countries argue over the wording of a final agreement.

In the context of ever more dire warnings from scientists and increasingly severe real-world climate disasters, this is an event cycle that is wearing thin. To many of those in attendance – and millions more looking on from afar – it is becoming increasingly clear that COP summits are failing to deliver meaningful progress.

This is a relatively new problem. For decades, the job of a COP negotiator was to forge some kind of global agreement to address climate change. That was no mean feat, and it took years of hard work and dedication to deliver the Paris Agreement in 2015. After the treaty was struck, climate negotiators then spent a few years busily drawing up the rules that would govern how the agreement would work in practice. But with that work largely completed by 2021, since then, COP summits have been left to drift, plagued by arguments over finance and bewildering last-minute disputes over the wording of seemingly uncontentious statements. At last year’s summit, for example, countries couldn’t agree on even mentioning fossil fuels in the final agreement.

COP31 will largely follow the same format. Arguments are already brewing over funding, negotiators are flexing their pens to hammer out details of new bureaucratic mechanisms, and hosts Turkey and Australia are limbering up for fresh disputes over which adverbs to deploy in a final agreement. This is your official warning: COP31 will not be the meeting that saves the world from climate peril.

But there could be one bright spark at the summit. An electrification pledge being touted by the Turkish presidency would see countries promise to increase electricity’s share of their final energy consumption to 35 per cent to 2035.

Focusing the climate effort on electrification is a smart move. In the current landscape, with disinformation rife and a climate denier still in the White House, electrifying stuff is probably our strongest climate weapon. High oil and gas prices and geopolitical instability make the energy security benefits of electrification obvious, while cheap green power could ease cost of living pressures in high-income countries and unlock development in low-income nations.

Electric power is also just so much more efficient than burning fuel. Electricity currently provides about 23 per cent of the energy delivered to consumers, but it powers sectors that make up 46 per cent of the global economy, energy analyst Jan Rosenow pointed out recently. If the world’s economy transitioned to a highly electrified state, powered by renewables, total primary energy use – the raw inputs into the energy system – would fall by almost 50 per cent, Rosenow’s analysis shows. Electrifying stuff is a common-sense move, before you even get to the climate benefits.

Plenty of richer countries are not moving fast enough on this stuff. China and Indonesia are ahead of both the US and the UK on electrifying their economies, while India and Brazil are catching up fast. We could learn a lot by looking beyond our borders. Annual climate meetings should become an opportunity for countries to swap notes and share best practice on the energy transition, not fight over the wording of virtue-signalling statements.

For too long, COPs have been generating a lot of words and not much action. But efforts are under way behind the scenes to redesign these meetings as useful events for the clean energy transition. The push for electrification offers a hint of what this could look like. If it delivers, COP summits might yet have a useful future.