The answer is proving far more contentious than the question.
Doubling the Grid or Doubling Down on Injustice?
The most immediate battle concerns electricity itself. A high-level roadmap backed by the International Energy Agency indicates that the amount of money invested in power grids each year must double from $0.5 trillion in 2025 to around $1 trillion each year until 2035, with significant investment in electricity storage and demand flexibility also needed.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has called for governments to focus on “decarbonising the way we generate electricity, but also expanding electrification into every sphere of life,” while Australian climate minister Chris Bowen and the EU’s energy commissioner have described electrification as “one of the most powerful policies available to reduce exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets and improve energy security.”
But the numbers have drawn sharp responses from the developing world. Nations across Africa and South Asia argue they cannot absorb grid upgrading costs without direct technology transfers from wealthier economies.
Meanwhile, green activist coalitions, including campaign groups such as 350.org, are demanding that electrification and energy justice be funded by large developed countries taxing the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies – a proposal that fossil-fuel-exporting economies are expected to resist fiercely in Antalya.
The debate over who should fund the grid of the future is, at its core, a debate about who bears the historical responsibility for the climate crisis in the first place.
Steel, Cement, and the Hard Problem of Industrial Decarbonisation
If grids represent the arterial infrastructure of the energy transition, then steel mills, cement plants, and chemical factories are its most stubborn blockages. Following gridlock over fossil fuel phase-outs at COP30 in Belém, negotiators have shifted focus toward a Green Industrialisation agenda, pushing capital toward the replacement of coal-fired industrial processes with green hydrogen-based Direct Reduced Iron systems and related low-carbon manufacturing technologies.
This shift is not happening in a vacuum. For the first time at COP30, trade – including carbon border measures such as the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – was discussed as part of formal negotiations, with a first-ever workstream on trade launched.
For emerging economies like India and those across Southeast Asia, the CBAM is experienced less as a climate tool than as a competitive barrier: their steel and cement exports face tariffs in European markets precisely because they cannot yet afford the green industrial upgrades that European manufacturers are subsidising. China’s massive clean-tech export subsidies compound the distortion.
COP31 planners are now actively debating whether a “Just Transition Mechanism” – the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM), agreed at COP30 and required to be developed by COP31 – can deliver lower-interest climate finance pipelines that allow emerging economies genuine access to high-tech green manufacturing, rather than simply being priced out of the future.
The BAM is designed to turn country transition plans into actionable programmes, linking power, grids, storage, industry, transport, buildings, and clean cooking into one pipeline so that finance funds whole systems, not orphan projects. Whether it can survive contact with the geopolitical tensions in Antalya remains to be seen.
The Clean Cooking Gap and the Fight for Decentralised Energy
While the big-ticket industrial debates dominate headlines, African and Asian delegations are pressing equally hard for a different kind of investment: distributed. Participants at an IEA high-level energy dialogue with Türkiye and Australia agreed on the need to speed up progress on expanding access to electricity and clean cooking around the world.
For hundreds of millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the energy transition is not about electric vehicles or green steel – it is about whether a family cooks dinner on firewood, with devastating consequences for health, deforestation, and black carbon emissions that, as scientists have demonstrated, travel thousands of kilometres to darken Himalayan glaciers.
The friction here is structural. Wealthier nations and private investors tend to prioritise multi-billion-dollar utility-scale renewable projects with predictable returns. Distributed solar infrastructure and clean cooking technologies, by contrast, require localised financing mechanisms tailored to small and medium enterprises in rural economies – exactly the kind of patient, high-risk, low-return investment that private capital instinctively avoids.
The UN and regional coalitions are forcing this tension onto the COP31 agenda, demanding that decentralised energy be treated not as a footnote but as a central pillar of the global energy transition.
Waste, Biomethane, and the Circular Economy Standoff
Türkiye has brought another front to the table, rooted in its domestic zero-waste policy agenda. The co-presidency is advancing a proposed global target for recycling and biomethane capture from organic waste – a circular economy framework that would, in theory, simultaneously reduce methane emissions, generate clean energy, and cut plastic pollution.
The ambition is real, but the politics are volatile. Debates are already fracturing over whether public capital should flow toward advanced municipal waste-to-energy technologies, or whether stricter caps on plastic production are the more urgent priority.
Fossil-fuel-reliant economies – for whom petrochemical plastics represent a significant economic lifeline as crude oil demand softens – are expected to push back hard against production caps in Antalya, echoing the same resistance that blocked explicit fossil fuel language at COP30 in Belém.
The Private Capital Problem: From Pledges to Pipelines
Cutting across all five investment debates is a single structural failure that COP31 must confront directly: the gap between climate finance pledged and climate finance deployed. COP30 outcomes included agreements to urgently advance actions to enable the scaling up of financing for developing country Parties for climate action from all public and private sources to at least USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035.
The “Belém Mission to 1.5°C” framework emerging from those talks is now the vehicle through which negotiators in Antalya are attempting to build “coherent investment pipelines” – structured, de-risked pathways that make it rational for private capital to flow into climate technology in Small Island Developing States, vulnerable coastlines, and the rural economies of the Global South, rather than simply into the lowest-risk, highest-return markets.
COP31 marks the crucial transition to implementation following the mandates of the Global Stocktake, with a unique host arrangement between Türkiye, Australia, and the Pacific designed to maintain focus on the existential threats faced by Small Island Developing States. For Pacific nations already experiencing coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion, and the slow disappearance of land, the investment debates in Antalya are not academic. They are existential.
The fundamental test of COP31 will not be the elegance of its negotiating texts. It will be whether the summit can produce binding, funded, time-bound commitments that move green technology from pilot projects to industrial scale – in steel towns in Bihar, in off-grid villages in the Sahel, in archipelago nations across the Pacific. The world has spent decades making climate promises. Antalya is where the building is supposed to begin.
References
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