As world leaders and critical stakeholders converge on Türkiye for the 31st UN climate summit, a difficult but necessary question hangs over the familiar ritual. The poser is: after more than three decades, is an annual COP still the best way to advance the global climate agenda?
The two-week conference opening on November 9 in Antalya will gather presidents, diplomats, scientists and activists to bring the climate emergency into sharp focus. Nearly 100 agenda items have been tabled for negotiations, ranging from climate finance and adaptation to loss and damage and energy transition.
I watched that familiar choreography up close at COP29 in Baku in 2024 – the endless pavilions, the late-night huddles over bracketed text, the stirring speeches about urgency followed by painstaking negotiations over wording. It was a powerful reminder of both the value and the limits of these gatherings.
But beyond the elegant speeches and communiques, we must ask whether the annual frequency of the summits has become a substitute for effectiveness. The case for moving from annual to biennial summits is not a call to retreat. Far from it. It is a plea for a more strategic, cost-effective and results-driven model of climate governance.
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Success should be measured not by how often governments meet as output, but by how faithfully their pledges translate into cleaner air, safer communities and more resilient economies in places like Borno, Turkana, the Mekong Delta or the Amazon Basin as outcome. That conversation on the frequency of the summit deserves space at COP31, even if outside the formal negotiating rooms, for many reasons.
First is cost, and the burden is no longer just an African story. Hosting a COP is a massive logistical undertaking: security, accommodation, transport and conference infrastructure for 40,000 to 80,000 participants. The UK spent an estimated 300 million pounds to host COP26 in Glasgow. For any host, it is a fiscal stretch.
For African economies already juggling debt distress, food insecurity and energy poverty, the bill can be prohibitive. It also explains why, despite bearing some of the harshest consequences of the climate crisis, Africa has hosted the summit only five times in 30 years – COP7 in Marrakech in 2001, COP12 in Nairobi in 2006, COP17 in Durban in 2011, COP22 in Marrakech in 2016, and COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022.
The same hosting fatigue is felt elsewhere. Small Island Developing States, which face an existential threat from rising sea level, have never hosted a COP due to scale and cost. Latin America, home to the Amazon, has hosted only three times. When the venue rotates, the Global South often has to build a temporary city from scratch.
Then there is the carbon cost, which is becoming hard to ignore. A 2026 study in Communications Sustainability estimated that air travel by Party and Observer delegates from COP1 to COP29 generated about 710,282 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. More telling is the quantum trajectory: from 2,959 tonnes in Berlin in 1995 to 76,931 tonnes in Baku last year, an increase of roughly 2,500 percent!
Those figures do not capture the full footprint of the summits, but they reveal an uncomfortable paradox that delegates themselves whisper about in the corridors – thousands boarding long-haul flights to discuss how to reduce emissions. A biennial rhythm would halve the frequency of these mega-gatherings and create room for more virtual consultations, regional climate weeks from Africa to Asia-Pacific, and leaner forms of engagement.
There is also the question of implementation. Climate action needs time, and the most vulnerable need even more of it. The annual cycle leaves ministries in a near-permanent state of negotiation. Pledges made in November are barely converted into national budgets and sub-national projects before the next round of talks begins.
We see this at home. Recent floods in Nigeria displaced over a million people. Lake Chad has shrunk by more than 90 percent since the 1960s, deepening conflict between farmers and herders across sub-Sahara Africa. The Sahel is heating 1.5 times faster than the global average.
The pattern is global, and the costs are increasingly human. Global climate impacts now include catastrophic events such as the glacier collapse in Nepal that claimed over 1,000 lives with about 5,000 missing, and extreme heat in Europe linked to tens of thousands of excess deaths. In Pakistan, the 2022 floods caused over 30 billion dollars in damages before its recovery plan could be fully funded by the next COP.
In Brazil, deforestation rates in the Amazon fluctuate faster than annual finance pledges can track. In Vanuatu and Tuvalu, leaders travel each year to plead for survival, yet the Loss and Damage fund agreed at COP27 took another two years to become operational. These are not problems that can be solved between COPs.
A two-year interval would change the incentive. Delegates would return not with a fresh set of promises, but with evidence: how much of the long-promised climate finance actually reached adaptation in Africa, how many hectares of the Great Green Wall were planted, how many communities in Southeast Asia have embraced energy transition, and how many homes in Florida or the Philippines were retrofitted for resilience. That would shift COP from a stage for declarations to a platform for accountability.
Finally, there is credibility. When annual summits end with familiar hollow language and thin follow-through, public fatigue sets in. In Baku, participants listened to the chilling tales of young activists from Kenya and Indonesia who had travelled 48 hours by bus and plane to be there. Their frustration was palpable: "We come every year, but the floods still come every year too."
That fatigue is now visible across continents. Polls in Europe show declining trust that COP pledges will be met. In the US, cities like Phoenix and Miami are spending billions on heat and flood adaptation while federal negotiating positions shift with each election cycle. Communities losing homes in Maiduguri, harvests in Malawi or fishing grounds in Fiji are not waiting for another declaration; they are waiting for irrigation, crop insurance, early warning systems and resilient infrastructure.
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Spacing the major conferences two years apart could restore a sense of occasion and scrutiny. Media coverage would be less routine, assessment by environmental rights advocacy groups would be more substantive, and the political cost of empty promises more palpable. The intervening year should not be a pause, but an accountability window.
This does not mean switching off climate diplomacy every other year. Technical negotiations must continue. The UNFCCC already has the architecture for annual synthesis reports, implementation reviews and regional climate weeks. What changes is not the continuity of work, but the frequency of the grand summit.
Yes, critics will worry that a biennial COP could sap momentum. That concern is valid, but urgency should compel better action, not simply more meetings. The UNFCCC has been indispensable in keeping climate on the global agenda. But no institution should be exempt from asking whether its operating model still fits the challenge it was built to address.
COP31 offers more than a negotiating deadline. It offers a moment to ask how we can make climate diplomacy work better for those who need it most. We all need it.
Aliu Akoshile, Editor-in-Chief of NatureNews Africa, writes via eic@naturenews.africa
