The test is no longer about what was promised, but whether governments can deliver on those promises
The 31st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP31, is being convened in Antalya, Turkiye, from Nov 9 to 20. Ten years after Paris, the focus has shifted from negotiating new rules to the more challenging task — whether governments can deliver on the rules they have already written. Closing the gap between what countries have promised and what they have actually done has become one core priority of global climate governance.
That gap is precisely where China's message for COP31 begins. At a news briefing of the State Council Information Office on Oct 21, Vice-Minister of Ecology and Environment Li Gao, who will again lead China's delegation, put it plainly: Global climate governance has shifted from negotiating rules to implementing them. COP31, he said, should focus on implementing and turning existing commitments into measurable action, and on confronting both the "old problems" of inadequate emissions cuts and insufficient financial support from developed countries, and the "new challenges" of unilateralism and protectionism that undermine collective climate efforts.
That framing is not rhetorical decoration. It reflects a thought about where the real deficits in the global climate system now lie. The rules of the Paris Agreement are largely written. What remains unfinished is the delivery, particularly the delivery of climate finance. COP31 should produce clear road maps. Without that, the implementation agenda will lack tangible financial support to move forward.
China's own record is offered as evidence that implementation is possible and that it is already underway. In 2025, China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP fell 17.7 percent compared with 2020. Non-fossil energy reached 21.7 percent of total energy consumption. Combined installed wind and solar capacity hit 1.84 billion kilowatts, and forest stock volume rose to 20.99 billion cubic meters. By the first half of 2026, total installed renewable energy capacity reached 2.46 billion kW and 60.7 percent of national power generation capacity. At the end of July, installed solar power surpassed coal power for the first time in history, becoming China's largest single power source. The country has built the world's largest carbon emissions trading market, covering about 8.3 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, or more than 65 percent of national emissions.
These figures matter for COP31 for a reason that goes beyond national pride. They demonstrate that the energy transition is not a theoretical exercise or a diplomatic bargaining chip. It is an industrial and infrastructural reality that is already reshaping the world's largest energy system. When it is said the green transition is "irreversible", it is describing a trajectory that has acquired its own momentum. The 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions, China's first absolute, economy-wide emissions reduction target covering all greenhouse gases, extends that trajectory into the next decade. The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period is now framed as the decisive window for peaking carbon emissions and delivering on both the 2030 and 2035 NDCs.
Yet China's COP31 agenda is not limited to showcasing domestic progress. There is a related point about equity that China has pressed consistently: the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. COP31 should advance a just transition mechanism that helps developing countries manage the social and economic costs of decarbonization and narrow the North-South gap. The logic is straightforward. Developing countries cannot implement ambitious NDCs without support; if finance is unavailable or comes mostly as loans rather than grants, the implementation gap widens precisely where the need is greatest.
The summit in Antalya carries a mandate with its formal agenda centering on implementation. Its formal agenda is light on headline items, and much of the energy will go into voluntary initiatives such as electrification, waste reduction, and resilient cities, which sit alongside the negotiating track rather than inside it. That makes the implementation test even more important. When the binding agenda is modest, the credibility of the process depends on whether governments can show that the commitments already made are being honored.
For China, the role at Antalya is therefore not that of a country arriving with a new set of pledges to unveil. It is that of a major economy arguing that the era of pledge-making must give way to the harder, less photogenic work of delivery: building the grids, scaling the markets, enforcing the targets and holding developed countries to the finance they have promised. The message is calibrated to a moment when the credibility of the multilateral climate process depends less on what is signed at the end of a summit than on what is actually built before the next one.
The author is a professor and the director of strategy and planning at the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation.
The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.
