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From record heat to climate resilience: What the COP31 Climate Summit must achieve
28/10/2026
Professor Heiko Balzter, Director of the Institute for Environmental Futures, writes:
After the UK’s hottest summer on record, the need to adapt to a changing climate has never been clearer. Professor Heiko Balzter explores what COP31 could achieve, how research is supporting practical solutions and why there are still reasons for hope.
Climate change is global, but its impacts are felt locally. The summer of 2026 was likely the UK’s hottest since records began in 1884, and the UK Health Security Agency provisionally estimated over 2800 heat-associated deaths in England during the exceptional heatwaves in May and June 2026. Tom Lancaster, farming analyst at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said that “Confirmation of 2026 as England’s worst cereal harvest on record means that four of the five worst harvests have now occurred since 2020 following extreme weather.”
As world leaders and their negotiating teams gather in Antalya, Türkiye, for the COP31 climate summit from 9 to 20 November 2026, they will do so against a backdrop of growing human and economic impacts from climate change. The question is no longer whether climate change is real or whether it is dominated by fossil fuel burning but how on Earth we can adapt fast enough to the havoc caused – predictably – by global climate change, while cutting our greenhouse gas emissions rapidly enough to prevent even worse to come.
The British summer of 2026
Five heatwaves struck the UK this summer, with more than 50 weather stations recording new local temperature records. The hottest day of the year recorded 38.1°C at Kew Gardens on 13 August. The heat was accompanied by a prolonged drought in three quarters of England and all of Wales.
The Met Office estimates that such an extreme summer is now around 130 times more likely because of human-caused climate change. Before the industrialisation, an extreme summer like 2026 would have been expected once every thousand years. Due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, it is now expected to occur every nine years. And if global emissions are not reduced very quickly, 2026 would be an average summer in a world that is 2.5-3°C warmer than pre-industrial times.
The scorching and unbearable heat that engulfed the UK and Europe in the summer of 2026 with its 32,000 excess death across Europe was merely one part of a worldwide horror show of extreme weather events. Uncontrollable wildfires engulfed large parts of France and other European countries and even in England wildfires destroyed homes and ecosystems alike. The World Meteorological Organisation reported record heat in North America, Africa and Asia in July and in Japan and the Republic of Korea in early August, while monsoon floods killed dozens in India and flash floods hit Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan. On 26 August 2026, a glacier and the bedrock underneath the ice collapsed near the Langtang Lirung peak on the Nepal-Tibet border and an almost 10 metres high wall of water destroyed everything in the narrow valley, killing over 1400 people with over 5000 still unaccounted for. All these extreme events are not unexpected. I have been lecturing about climate change at the University of Leicester for 20 years now and subsequent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports have been warning of all these climate impacts for decades. They have just been largely ignored by decision-makers and large parts of the public and discredited by coordinated disinformation campaigns seeking to bring climate science into disrepute.
What climate adaptation needs now
Climate adaptation pays for itself. The COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum told The Guardian that “If you don’t spend one unit of money prior to the disasters, then you are left in a position where you have to spend 10 units of money after the disaster. It’s cheaper pre-disaster.”
The summer of 2026 showed that money in the UK is needed for heat-health warning systems that reach vulnerable people, especially the elderly, for cooler buildings and greener streets, for more water storage and drought contingency planning, and for wildfire risk prevention. At the same time, low- and middle-income countries that are suffering impacts such as sea level rise and huge losses to their GDP as their harvests fail are in urgent need of financial help from wealthier nations to compensate for irreversible losses and reoccurring damages from climate change. At the previous COP30 in Belém, countries adopted 59 voluntary indicators to track the Global Goal on Adaptation. Mechanisms for these adaptation financing instruments have been agreed in principle at previous climate summits but they need much more investment to make them work. The speed of climate change impacting on all our lives has overtaken the speed of global climate negotiations, and probably even domestic planning timescales.
The promise of COP31
COP31 can be seen as an implementation COP, and official communications so far put adaptation and resilience at its heart. In a new model, Türkiye hosts this climate summit and holds the Presidency of COP31, while Australia has the presidency of the negotiations and has exclusive authority to lead the negotiations in consultation with Türkiye. The Pacific nations of Fiji and Tuvalu hosted the pre-COP in early October.
The COP31 presidency pledged support for the delivery of emission reductions through the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to keep 1.5°C within reach and for National Adaptation Plans to advance the Global Goal on Adaptation, as well as for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. Ten priority themes include climate-resilient cities, food security and resilient health systems, and a Climate Implementation Bridge to turn national plans into finance-ready projects, which are about to be piloted in Ethiopia, Fiji, Indonesia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
What can COP31 in Antalya realistically achieve? In my opinion world leaders of members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (which currently excludes one of the main emitters – the USA) need to tackle several pressing issues:
- Establish a global transition away from fossil fuel dependency. Fossil fuel resources are currently a major factor of geopolitical instability, armed conflicts, and the cost-of-living crisis. Transitioning towards renewable energy sources, as the UK Government is doing right now, will pay off by lowering energy bills at the same time as being good for global climate. The world cannot afford business as usual wreaking havoc on people and the environment. Globally, we need to get onto an emissions pathway that brings the world back down from the current trajectory towards +2.7 °C closer to the Paris goal of +1.5 °C above pre-industrial temperatures.
- Make the adaptation indicators usable. COP30 agreed 59 Global Goal on Adaptation indicators but operational details are entangled in a long negotiation process. COP31 should accelerate that implementation and connect it to data that countries can actually collect within their current capabilities. Rapid assessment needs to become the mantra.
- Provide climate adaptation finance. COP30 in Belém called for at least tripling global adaptation finance by 2035, but that investment is currently more a trickle than a torrent. Much more substantial financial resources need to be made available to help the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world become safer from deadly impacts of climate change.
Reason for hope
A real success story in the global efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change is the ongoing global energy transition. This transition is now mainly driven by economics and the desire by nations to become independent from fragile fossil fuel supply chains and unpredictable oil price fluctuations driving the cost of living. Energy sovereignty and respiratory health in cities are as important as policy drivers as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Global renewable energy additions reached a record of about 800 GW in 2025, around three-quarters of it from solar energy. Record funding goes into solar-plus-storage systems worldwide. The COP31 Presidency is building on that momentum. Even before the climate summit started, the COP31 has already published a ‘35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge’ to raise the share of electricity amongst energy use to 35% by 2035.
The summer of 2026 shows that climate change has arrived. Even the hardiest climate deniers who do not ‘believe in science’ find it harder and harder to ignore the signs. Even though the 1.5 °C Paris goal seems out of reach now, every tenth of a degree of avoided global warming reduces the worst excesses of heat, drought and wildfire we will need to live with and adapt to. Like the previous thirty climate summits, COP31 will not be able to solve the climate crisis. But it can continue to avert even worse climate impacts than the world already suffers from. And it can design adaptation actions that save millions of lives, especially in the poorest and most vulnerable communities.
Our observer delegation from the Institute for Environmental Futures will be there on the ground and participate online. We will showcase how the outputs of our world-class research can help find solutions to the many problems arising from the climate crisis. Let’s make the implementation COP work.