Last year, COP30 marked an important shift in the global climate agenda: from setting ambition towards implementation. As attention now turns to COP31, the challenge is to build on that momentum and demonstrate what implementation looks like in practice.
Despite geopolitical and economic headwinds, multilateral cooperation remains essential to driving progress on climate action. COP31 provides an important moment to strengthen international collaboration and focus attention on practical delivery.
Hosted by Türkiye in Antalya, with Australia leading the formal negotiations, COP31 will bring a distinctive model of shared leadership.
For the UK’s financial and related professional services industry, this creates an important opportunity. Delivering climate objectives will require more than finance alone. It will require deeper partnerships across the public and private sectors to develop investable projects, manage risk and mobilise capital at scale.
The COP31 agenda: focus on implementation
COP30 put implementation front and centre. COP31 now needs to build on that foundation by creating the conditions for implementation at scale.
The COP31 Presidency has characterised Antalya as both an ‘Implementation COP’ and a ‘COP of the Future’, underpinned by the principles of dialogue, consensus and action. Its Action Agenda spans ten priority themes, with a strong focus on the real economy, including clean energy and electrification, climate-resilient cities and a Climate Implementation Bridge designed to connect commitments with investment and delivery.
This focus matters because many of the solutions required for the transition already exist. The challenge is increasingly to create the conditions that allow them to be financed, replicated and scaled across different markets.
The Action Agenda also provides an important route for governments, businesses, financial institutions and wider stakeholders to contribute to delivery alongside the formal negotiations.
This is particularly relevant for financial and related professional services. Effective implementation requires the right combination of policy frameworks, commercially viable projects, investment, risk management, market infrastructure and institutional capability. International cooperation can help share practical experience, strengthen alignment between markets, and create the enabling conditions needed to mobilise capital at scale.
Financial and related professional services as a delivery partner
There is no single solution to mobilising climate finance. Capital needs to be matched with credible policy frameworks, effective risk allocation, strong market infrastructure and commercially viable projects.
Financial and related professional services can help bring these elements together, with capabilities spanning banking, investment, insurance and capital markets, alongside legal, advisory, accounting and other professional expertise.
This is reflected in our Team UK approach to international sustainable finance, which brings together complementary UK capabilities to help translate climate ambitions into investable opportunities. This ecosystem approach is partners-ship led, grounded in local priorities and focused on delivering scalable solutions.
Priority areas of focus include developing credible transition finance frameworks and investable project pipelines; using insurance and risk management expertise to strengthen climate resilience; and supporting the development of high-integrity carbon markets that can channel additional capital towards climate and development priorities.
From implementation to scale
The UK’s financial and related professional services industry has an important contribution to make. Its value is not simply in providing capital, but in helping create the conditions in which private capital can be mobilised effectively and at scale.
These themes will shape our engagement in Antalya. Through our COP31 programme, we will bring together governments, international institutions and industry to help turn priorities into investable opportunities, manage risk and build the capacity needed for long-term delivery.
COP31 is an opportunity to demonstrate that international cooperation can deliver practical results and that, by working together, governments and industry can turn climate ambition into action at scale.
