This week, around 80 world leaders – including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – will descend on the coastal Turkish city of Antalya for the annual United Nations climate summit, COP31. For the first time, the summit duties will be shared; Turkey will play host, while Australia leads negotiations.

At home, these national leaders have no shortage of issues to contend with: the challenges of AI, major wars and declining trust in democracy. Yet looming over all of them is the existential threat posed by a heating planet.

Climate change is a truly global challenge. Greenhouse gases have no respect for national boundaries, and the devastating impacts are being felt everywhere. We don’t have a world government, but we do have processes of international diplomacy to hammer out shared commitments. This is how the world is trying to deal with the climate crisis.

It can be easy to be pessimistic, but COP31 can still deliver real progress. In Antalya, countries will consider a global electrification target to hasten the shift from coal, oil and gas toward clean electricity.

If agreement can be found, this will be a major step forward.

Remind me, what is a COP?

When scientific consensus emerged on global warming in the 1980s, countries negotiated and signed a new framework on climate change in Rio De Janeiro in 1992.

Since then, diplomats and negotiators have met annually for the UN’s Conference of Parties (COP) to discuss how to........

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