For years, climate COPs have been measured by the commitments countries make. Ahead of COP31, Palladium experts say the more important question is becoming harder to avoid: what will it take to actually deliver them?

Last year’s COP30 in Belém made some headway. The final package advanced adaptation and launched new implementation initiatives, while calling for US$1.3 trillion in annual climate finance by 2035 and a tripling of adaptation finance. But countries again failed to agree to a formal commitment to transition away from fossil fuels.

Against that backdrop, Palladium experts working across a variety of sectors are looking to COP31 for fewer promises and much more attention to how commitments become investable, accountable action.

From Ambition to Execution

For Ed Humphry, Palladium’s UK Head of Climate and Sustainability, the challenge is no longer identifying what needs to happen. “We’ve made many of the commitments we need. The challenge now is turning them into action.”

And much of that work will take place far from a COP negotiating room.

“Implementation won’t happen at an international forum; it happens at the country level,” Humphry says. That means moving beyond individual projects towards changes that allow governments, businesses and other actors to work together at scale.

Ashba Tasneem of Palladium India sees the same challenge at city level. Her work on the Pimpri Chinchwad Climate Action Plan and Climate Budget has highlighted the distance between setting targets and embedding them into the decisions governments make every day.

“Climate goals become meaningful only when they are integrated into annual budgets, infrastructure investments, public service delivery, and day-to-day decision-making,” she says.

Success at COP31, Tasneem argues, should therefore be judged less by the number of new pledges than by whether existing commitments result in funded, measurable action.

There are already examples of what that can look like.

Across the Pacific, REnew Pacific is working to bring renewable energy to rural and remote communities. The Australian Government’s AU$75 million programme, implemented by Palladium, is designed to support clean energy projects that improve access to services including health, education, clean water and food security.

For Mohammed Angawi, Team Leader for REnew Pacific, those practical examples should be at the centre of the conversation in Antalya. “COP31 has to be the COP where the conversation moves from what we’ve promised to what we’ve built.”

Through REnew Pacific, Angawi points to work bringing clean, reliable power to off-grid communities, including health centres in Vanuatu, clinics and schools in Solomon Islands and solar mini-grids on Kiribati’s outer islands.

His hope for COP31 is equally practical: “more partnerships like this, where support reaches communities quickly and local partners lead the way.”

That raises the next question for COP31: how do countries and their partners finance more of this kind of delivery?

Making Climate Finance Work

Money is central to that implementation gap, but several Palladium experts argue that the headline amount is only part of the problem. Cindy Wilhelm, Senior Manager, Sustainable Infrastructure, wants the focus to move towards whether existing climate funds and emerging initiatives can get capital into projects.

“The test is whether these efforts actually change how finance flows,” she says. That includes whether developing countries and communities can readily access resources and whether public and concessional capital can unlock wider investment.

“We don’t need more ambitious commitments. What we need are concrete tools that put existing commitments to work.”

Nadhia Najeeb, Market Development Facility Program Officer, approaches the same problem from the private sector. Businesses and communities may recognise the case for adaptation and low-carbon technologies, she says, but investment has to be financially viable if solutions are to reach scale.

She hopes COP31 will sharpen the focus on “creating the right conditions for investment”, including affordable finance, insurance and concrete support for renewable energy and climate-resilient technologies.

There are opportunities to free up resources too, argues Antonio Espinoza. With public budgets under pressure, he points to agriculture, energy efficiency and renewable energy as areas where climate action can generate economic savings, alongside redirecting environmentally harmful subsidies towards climate mitigation.

His point is a blunt one: “After a decade of excessive focus on pledges and commitments, the time is over-ripe for COPs to prioritise and enforce action.”

Building Energy Systems that Can Withstand Shocks

Financing the transition is only part of the equation. As countries electrify more of their economies, the resilience of the systems supplying that electricity matters too.

Araí Monteforte points to recent disruptions in global energy markets as evidence that diversification has become an economic and energy-security issue as much as a climate one. “Resilience comes from diversification. I’d like COP31 to back national plans stress-tested against drought, price and supply shocks.”

That would mean looking beyond how quickly countries can add renewable capacity to whether their energy systems can keep functioning when conditions change. “The more we electrify, the more we depend on the grid,” she adds.

For Monteforte, delivery at COP31 should pair electrification targets with secure and affordable power. The implication is practical: implementation plans need to account for drought, volatile fuel prices and interrupted supply, rather than assuming the conditions under which they were written will remain stable.

That idea broadens the definition of implementation running through the contributions. A funded climate plan is important, but so is whether that plan can continue delivering when the next external shock arrives.

Keeping Nature and Communities in the Picture

Implementation cannot come at the expense of the broader systems on which economies and communities depend. “I’d like to see COP31 set the scene for deep system change,” says Palladium Consultant Naomi Conway, including “a mindset of nature as critical to our future”, faster movement away from fossil fuels and a challenge to subsidies that contribute to ecosystem destruction.

That relationship between nature, livelihoods and capital is already being tested in tropical forests.

Kate McCoy, Partnerships for Forests Team Leader, says the programme is supporting forest-positive businesses and sustainable land-use models across Latin America, Southeast Asia and East Africa. Its portfolio demonstrates approaches being developed across different forest landscapes.

There is a second test as investment grows: who benefits.

“Increased investment in forests and nature needs to deliver tangible benefits for the people who live in and manage these landscapes,” McCoy says. That means protecting the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and local communities while creating viable economic opportunities. Across the P4F portfolio, approaches range from social forestry in Indonesia to Brazilian value chains that generate income from products sourced from standing forests.

For Amit Patjoshi, the shift towards implementation also means recognising that climate action cannot be separated from countries’ wider development priorities.

“The real test of climate leadership is not the ambition we articulate, but the change we deliver.”

India’s experience, he says, shows why climate action and development need to advance together. Doing so at scale will require accessible climate finance, technology partnerships and collaboration between governments, businesses and development institutions.

But how that transition happens matters too. Patjoshi argues that climate action must be “equitable, economically viable and grounded in the realities of those most affected.”

“COP31 must help turn global commitments into investments, solutions and measurable outcomes at scale.”

Progress Beyond the Negotiating Room

That scale of change cannot be delivered by national governments alone.

Carolina Silva, UK PACT Fund Manager for Brazil, is realistic about what one conference can achieve. “I don’t think COP31 will suddenly close the gap between ambition and implementation,” she says. National interests and questions of trust will continue to shape negotiations.

But she sees reason for optimism in the widening group of organisations acting on climate change: investors, businesses, civil society and local governments, as well as national governments.

COP30 illustrated both sides of that equation. It produced new initiatives on implementation, adaptation and climate finance but could not reach consensus on one of the most difficult questions: fossil fuels.

That makes the networks around formal negotiations increasingly important. For Silva, COP remains “a vital space for building trust, supporting multilateralism, and reminding us that climate change is a challenge no country can solve alone.”

Across these perspectives, the expectations for COP31 are strikingly consistent. Finance needs to reach projects and communities. Cities need the authority, resources and capacity to put their climate plans into practice. Businesses need conditions that make climate investment viable. Nature and livelihoods must remain part of the economic calculation.

COP31 will not solve the implementation gap in a fortnight. But it can create the conditions for progress: financing partnerships tied to real project pipelines; national and subnational implementation compacts; changes to investment, procurement and planning rules; and public-private commitments with clear timetables and accountability.

The more meaningful test will come in the months that follow. Are governments putting climate commitments into budgets and infrastructure decisions? Are public and multilateral finance making projects investable and drawing in private capital? Are businesses investing because the economics have genuinely changed? And are those investments producing measurable benefits for communities, nature and more resilient energy systems?

The real test of COP31 will not be how many commitments it produces, but whether it creates the finance, rules and partnerships that cause governments and markets to behave differently once the conference is over.