The Mediterranean beachside haven of Antalya in Turkey is more used to hosting well-fed tourists than stressed climate negotiators. But for two weeks starting on 9 November, the city will become the climate change capital of the world, welcoming tens of thousands of delegates to the UN COP31 summit.

COP31 is the latest instalment of the annual climate summits where countries come together with the aim of tackling climate change. The meetings were responsible for ushering in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the climate treaty under which nations have promised to hold warming to “well below” 2°C and as close to 1.5°C as possible.

But in recent years, the summits have had a less impressive track record. Critics argue the meetings are no longer fit for purpose, undermined by the need for unanimous consensus in all decisions and struggling to find direction now that the work of agreeing a legal climate treaty is completed.

Delegates left last year’s COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, having agreed the bare minimum – that they remain united behind the Paris Agreement. But after a fortnight of tortuous negotiations, they were unable to agree on fresh commitments to move away from fossil fuel use or end deforestation.

And although the world is now on course for lower levels of warming than looked likely before the Paris Agreement was struck, global emissions are still not falling and the world is on track for 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century – nowhere near the goals laid out under Paris.

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So can this upcoming summit, COP31, change the game?

This year’s brutal weather should provide plenty of motivation. From devastating glacier collapses to severe heatwaves and raging wildfires, there has been no shortage of reminders that planet Earth is teetering on the brink of crisis. And that all came ahead of a super-sized El Niño now under way in the Pacific, a timely demonstration of what warming beyond 1.5°C will feel like in the real world – hot and dangerous, in short.

But don’t expect fireworks from this COP. So far, the mood music from the hosts – a joint gig between Turkey and Australia – is setting the tone for a business-as-usual summit.

Hangovers from Belém

As with recent summits, there’s no big declaration or new treaty pegged for Antalya. Instead, the main task negotiators face will be to grapple with a series of hangover decisions from Belém.

At COP30, countries agreed to create a “just transition mechanism”, which has alternatively been described as a “platform”, a “hub” and a “work programme”. The idea is to provide a support structure for those affected by the shift to a cleaner economy. For example, countries need to work out how best to support and retrain workers in the fossil fuel economy as energy grids transition to cleaner fuels. But the process of identifying how this just transition mechanism will work in practice has barely begun.

Nations also agreed to triple adaptation finance for lower-income countries – in short, helping them cope with the impacts of climate change – by 2035. But the commitment was vague, with no baseline year and no agreement on who should contribute or what types of finance would count. Delegates in Antalya will continue to hammer out the details.

“These are all big, kind of chunky areas where you know there will be strong expectation from developing countries and civil society that there is progress made,” says at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK climate and energy think tank.

Road map to nowhere?

One of the biggest disappointments from COP30 was that countries failed to commit to developing “road maps” away from fossil fuels. This would involve drawing up plans for moving their economies away from oil, gas and coal use. Although the idea had backing from more than 80 nations in Brazil, the final text from the summit failed to mention fossil fuels at all.

Countries that still backed the idea gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April this year and jointly promised to draw up transition plans. However, to date, only France has produced anything like a fully fledged road map away from fossil fuels. Some countries are expected to announce their road maps on the sidelines of COP31, but it is unclear whether any major fossil fuel economies will come forward.

And despite a global oil crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that makes the case for clean energy ever more obvious, it is unlikely the road map idea will make it into the formal COP agenda this year.

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Instead, the summit’s hosts are pushing electrification as a route away from fossil fuels. The more you can electrify cars, home heating and the like, the faster the clean transition, the thinking goes. Turkey has launched a new “electrification target” that would see countries commit to electrifying 35 per cent of their annual energy consumption by 2035, up from the current rate of about 23 per cent.

We don’t yet know whether this would be a voluntary pledge countries would sign up to, or something that the hosts will push to be universally agreed under the main negotiations. Questions also remain over whether the target will include any directive for countries to decarbonise their power grids. Turkey and Australia “are talking about electrification in isolation, [and] rarely talking about electrification linked to ramping up renewables and decarbonising”, says Redmond-King.

Geopolitical headaches

Meanwhile, there are some serious headwinds facing the summit. In the face of rising fuel prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran conflict, wealthy nations are tightening their belts. International aid has been cut significantly from many national budgets, including in the UK, where spending is set to fall by £6.5 billion to a historical low in 2027/2028. That leaves less money for funding climate action in lower-income countries, who in turn say they can’t take action to cut emissions without more cash. Arguments over funding risk souring the atmosphere of the summit.

Then there’s the awkward issue of the hosts. Both Turkey and Australia wanted to host COP31 and neither would back down, so the UN awarded them joint hosting responsibilities. Turkey is responsible for the location and logistics, as well as the so-called Action Agenda, which includes the pledges, commitments and announcements outside of the negotiations. Australia, meanwhile, will run the formal talks. But running a successful COP is a major challenge even for one country. With two countries in charge, there’s a real risk of things drifting into confusion and infighting. Questions over their commitment to the cause linger over both countries, who have each been slow to embrace the energy transition and still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

But there are a few spots of hope too. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a historic fourth term as president last month, defying expectations to beat right-wing populist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory means Brazil’s delegation will be in Turkey pushing for more progress on deforestation and fossil fuel transition road maps.

Meanwhile, Democrats may take control of the US Congress in midterm elections on 3 November, just before COP31 kicks off. A win for the Democrats in both houses could lead to renewed incentives for clean energy development and electric vehicles.

The US withdrew from both the Paris Agreement and the UN climate convention after Donald Trump took office in 2025, a move that has substantially worsened warming projections for 2100. Any sense that the US is returning to climate action will bolster morale among delegates.

What’s the headline?

In the formal negotiations track, there will be further talks on how the different “implementation” programmes on cutting emissions and ensuring a fair transition will work in practice. But these are unlikely to produce any big headlines.

“What we are going to see… in Antalya are many very important discussions, but they are less grand, big decisions,” , executive director of COP30, told journalists on a briefing call on 22 October.

A cover decision, which can summarise key decisions or include new pledges, could offer the opportunity for nations to present a new headline-grabbing commitment. Australia and Turkey have said ahead of the summit that they will work on developing a cover text, which could acknowledge the inevitability that the world will overshoot 1.5°C of warming and call on countries to go faster on cutting emissions.

Negotiations over the wording of the cover decisions often provide the dramatic finale for a COP summit. But it can become a trap for ministers running the event, says , a highly experienced climate negotiator who has led both the French and European Union delegations at COPs.

Ministerial teams come into a COP thinking, “how do I get a result that doesn’t look dreadful?” says Watkinson. “Particularly the ministers in charge; they want to get a boost to their career, and the country wants to say it’s done something important for the world.” It means COPs often end up “focused on yet another decision where we change the adverb”, he says.

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Watkinson wants to see COP summits focus much less on headlines generated by cover texts, and more on the backroom work to get countries to collaborate and communicate with each other. “If we seek the big decision each year, we’re using a huge amount of energy to get it, and we’re not focusing on the real challenge, which is how do we overcome the barriers that are holding us back,” he says.

That might mean changing the process to focus less on a consensus outcome with all parties, with action instead delivered by smaller groups of willing participants who work together to concentrate on delivering emissions cuts, he says.

It looks likely that the Antalya summit, despite its postcard-worthy setting, will be an unglamourous mix of long nights and bitter quarrels, reluctant compromises and underwhelming outcomes.

But for meeting insiders, the hope is that change will come in time for COP33 in two years’ time, when countries are due to conclude a global assessment of their progress to decarbonisation. The pressure will be even greater on that COP to deliver a meaningful response to the stocktake’s findings. The question is, can these summits reinvent themselves in time? As Watkinson puts it: “Practically everybody I speak to says, of course, we need to change it. We can’t carry on as we do.”

Some people are convinced that fruit and vegetable skin is particularly nutritious, and now scientists have confirmed the idea. They have discovered that these parts of fruits and vegetables often contain far more fibre than the flesh we normally consume.

The finding suggests cooks are unwittingly discarding fibre-rich food by chucking out the seeds, skins and stems of fruits and vegetables when preparing a meal.

Home cooks and caterers should adopt “root to tip” eating and start cooking with squash peel, watermelon rind and pepper stalks to improve the public’s intake of dietary fibre, the team says.

“We’ve really got to shift our purchasing habits to buy whole fruits and vegetables, and then use all of the fruits and vegetables in dishes,” says at King’s College London.

Gibson and her colleagues tested the fibre content of 12 fruits and vegetables, including butternut squash, kiwi fruit, watermelon, broccoli and bell pepper. The team measured the fibre content both in the parts typically consumed and the parts that usually go to waste.

They found that, in 10 of the 12 produce types, the normally wasted components contain more fibre than the commonly consumed parts. Butternut squash seeds and skin, for example, contained 9.25 grams of fibre per 100 grams, compared with 2 g of fibre per 100 g of squash flesh. Meanwhile, the skin and core of a pineapple core contains 450 per cent more fibre than the flesh. These skin and core components are often tough to chew, but the researchers say they can be blended, grated or roasted to make them more palatable.

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Just 4 per cent of British adults meet the recommended minimum daily intake of 30 g of dietary fibre, with the average adult consuming around half that per day.

Gibson suggests caterers could use the findings to design fibre-rich meals using more produce that would otherwise go to waste. This could reduce food waste and cut costs for commercial kitchens, as well as increasing dietary fibre intake, she says.

King’s College London’s canteen piloted a “root to tip” menu in May 2025. Meals included a West African peanut stew made with all of a butternut squash, kale stalks and leek tops, and a watermelon salad featuring pickled watermelon rind.

Simple menu tweak can nudge people into choosing climate-friendly food

Rejigging the meal choices on offer in a canteen can prompt people to make healthier, climate-friendlier decisions

Eating a larger proportion of harvested fruit and vegetables will also improve the resilience of the food system in the face of climate shocks, says Gibson. “Everything we pull out of the ground that we can eat, we should be eating.”

at City St George’s University of London says the research is an “exciting investigation”. But he points out that the most carbon-intensive food waste is meat and dairy products. Reducing fruit and vegetable waste is therefore “part of the solution, but it’s not the only thing we need to do”, he says.

These beautiful photos capture how a remote island community safely shepherds its rare seabirds to the ocean.

The Azores hosts three-quarters of the global population of Cory’s shearwaters, which nest in burrows and clifftops around the Atlantic archipelago. Chicks stay in their nests all spring and summer until they have grown big enough to attempt their first flight, seen in the image above.

Once ready, the young birds take flight by night to avoid predators, using the moon and stars to navigate to the ocean. But it isn’t just predators these birds should be wary of, photographer Andrea Zanenga discovered when he visited Corvo. The tiny Portuguese island has just 430 human inhabitants, but is home to the world’s largest colony of Cory’s shearwaters.

During their fledging window in late October and early November, the young shearwaters are easily confused by artificial lights. The seabirds can’t take off from ground level, so if they crash, they remain stuck on the ground, vulnerable to attack or starvation.

“These are young birds, 3 months old, and most of them are doing their first flight,” says Tânia Pipa, a marine biologist at the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds.

“They get lost. If you have a point with light pollution, they see it as guidance and go to that place, and get disorientated.” On the worst nights, Corvo residents might find dozens of stranded birds on the streets of the island’s only settlement, Vila do Corvo.

An Azores-wide campaign known as SOS Cagarro was launched in 1995 to rescue fallen shearwaters. Volunteers join night walks to spot stranded birds and place them in artificial nests (above).

The birds are released the following day from nearby clifftops.

But the residents of Corvo have gone one better. For five nights during the peak fledging season, all public lighting in Vila do Corvo is switched off from 9pm until midnight to help the birds navigate safely out to the ocean.

Corvo is the only island in the Azores to operate such a self-imposed blackout, leaving it free of light pollution. “When you see this sky with a lot of stars, you feel a little bit smaller,” says Zanenga.