COP31 Antalya Climate Change Conference

COP 31 Antalya Climate Change Conference
COP is the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The Conference of the Parties is the supreme decision-making body of the UNFCCC, which was adopted in 1992.
COP31 will be hosted by Türkiye in Antalya on 9-20 November 2026.
Where Dialogue Becomes Global Action

11 September
This climate problem isn’t on the UN agenda — data centers
The slow moving climate talks are struggling to address one of the world’s biggest drivers of rising energy demand.
(Politico) The disruptive technology that’s plunging the world into an energy race won’t be part of the debate when nearly every country meets in November to discuss climate change.
The artificial intelligence building boom and its attendant forecasts of skyrocketing electricity demand, new natural gas plants and the potential for accelerating greenhouse gases are nowhere on the agenda for the United Nations climate talks in Turkey.
That’s raising questions about the U.N.’s slow motion bureaucracy and whether it’s nimble enough to confront the surging pace of data center construction in the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest sources of climate pollution.
AI and the data centers underpinning it haven’t made the formal cut for the conference in Turkey because no country has proposed that the issue be included, according to a COP31 official.
The U.N. climate talks have formally addressed data centers’ impact just once. Tucked into the outcome agreement from the 2023 talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was a paragraph focused on how AI could help find solutions for climate change. At the end, it noted that the technology could also pose “challenges and risks” to the environment.
Under the COP’s so-called action agenda — meant to boost voluntary climate efforts — this year’s hosts have made electrification a priority by proposing that 35 percent of global energy use come from electricity by 2035. Data centers are closely connected to that objective, which calls for meeting growing energy demand through “cleaner power, stronger grids and greater energy efficiency,” said Halil Hasar, chief climate diplomacy officer for the COP31 presidency.
“The key climate question is not simply how much electricity data centers consume, but how that additional electricity demand is met,” Hasar said in an email. …
The surging power requirements from data centers are competing for space at COP31. Top issues on the agenda include taking steps to fulfill the 2023 pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, addressing adaptation goals and bolstering economic support for poor countries on the frontlines of global warming.
Anne Rasmussen, the lead negotiator for a group of small-island nations known as AOSIS, said her coalition doesn’t have a position on data centers, but the countries are concerned about any significant new demand for global energy.
“Technological progress must come hand in hand with the rapid decarbonisation of the global energy system,” she said in a statement. “We absolutely cannot afford to build the technologies of tomorrow on the destructive systems of the past.”
In the U.S., the priority for data center developers is speed, which means they’re taking whatever power they can get. It comes as President Donald Trump has rejected climate science and withdrawn from international efforts to address warming, including the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.