By James Trinder, International Climate Policy Coordinator, CAN Europe
The June climate talks in Bonn, which took place from 8 to 18 June 2026, were not expected to deliver advanced negotiation texts for the full political package needed for COP31. They did expose, however, with unusual clarity, the delivery tests governments must now meet on the road to Antalya: preparing for a strong Just Transition Mechanism, restoring trust on climate finance, strengthening mitigation cooperation, and turning the global commitment to transition away from fossil fuels into practical action.
SB64 took place against a difficult geopolitical backdrop. The United States remain absent from climate diplomacy. Trade tensions are rising. Some governments are spending increasing sums on defense and arms production, but, no matter whether the threats triggering this are perceived or real, cutting climate and development budgets at the same time is an irrational and unacceptable choice. Extreme climate impacts are accelerating, and civic space remains under pressure in many countries. In that context, Bonn was less a technical stopover than a stress test for whether the Paris Agreement’s so-called “implementation era” is being matched by the political, financial and institutional conditions required to make implementation real.
The answer from the UNFCCC negotiations was mixed. There was real progress in some areas, especially on the Belém-Antalya Mechanism for a Just Transition. Other areas remained blocked by familiar fault lines: developed countries’ reluctance to provide higher amounts and more predictable public finance; resistance from fossil fuel-dependent countries to stronger mitigation cooperation; and unresolved tensions over how trade, industrial policy and climate action interact.
Yet the talks also confirmed something broader: climate diplomacy is increasingly operating on two tracks.
The first track is the formal UNFCCC process. It remains indispensable. It is where equity, responsibility, transparency, finance obligations and universal participation must be anchored on the basis of jointly negotiated – and in the case of the UNFCCC itself and the Paris Agreement, ratified – legal agreements. But it is slow, consensus-bound and vulnerable to obstruction. The second track is a growing ecosystem of coalition-based implementation diplomacy: Santa Marta and Tuvalu, London Climate Action Week, the Ministerial on Climate Action, national and regional roadmaps to exit fossil fuels, plurilateral initiatives, biregional partnerships and civil society-state alliances. This second track cannot replace the UNFCCC. But it is increasingly where political momentum is generated before being brought back into the formal process.
This two-track reality may become one of the defining features of climate diplomacy between COP31 and GST2.
Just Transition: the clearest route to COP31 legitimacy
The clearest area of progress in Bonn was the movement toward operationalising the Belém-Antalya Mechanism for a Just Transition. This mechanism, agreed at COP30 and expected to be fleshed out at COP31, could become one of the most important institutional outcomes for the climate regime since the Paris Agreement if the Parties get it right.
Its importance lies in the fact that Just Transition is no longer only about workers in high-carbon sectors, important though that remains. It is now a broader organising principle for climate implementation: how countries transform energy, food, industry, transport, land use and adaptation systems while protecting rights, livelihoods, public services and social cohesion. Any climate action that ignores these realities will struggle to build the public mandate required for durable transformation.
In Bonn, discussions were sometimes slowed by procedural fights, including over the terms of reference for the Just Transition Work Programme review. But by the second week, draft text on the operationalisation of the mechanism provided a credible platform for further work before Antalya. The task now is to ensure that the mechanism does not become a talking shop. It must have a clear mandate rooted in the principles agreed at COP30, the ability to identify and mobilise support for national Just Transition strategies, and structured participation of rights-holders, workers, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women, youth, people with disabilities and others directly affected by transition decisions.
For the EU, this is both an opportunity and a test. Europe has real domestic experience with Just Transition planning and financing, including the political difficulty of matching industrial transition with social protection and regional support. But that experience should produce humility, not lecturing. The EU should engage constructively with partners from the Global South, including where differences over principles remain, and help land a mechanism that supports nationally owned strategies rather than imposing a European template.
If delivered well, the Belém-Antalya Mechanism could change the mood music of future COPs. It could give practical meaning to the promise that climate action can improve people’s lives, not simply demand sacrifice from those with the least power.
Finance remains a legitimacy crisis
If Just Transition offered the clearest progress story, finance remained the deepest legitimacy problem.
COP30 agreed to establish a work programme on climate finance, including on Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement which is specifically about the legally binding obligation for developed countries to provide climate finance. Bonn should have been the moment to begin translating that mandate into a serious process: clarifying how the new climate finance goal will be implemented, how public finance will be provided, how adaptation finance will be scaled up, and how support will reach the communities and countries facing the sharpest impacts. Instead, progress was limited, raising the risk that avoidable political fights are repeated from COP30 and pushed into COP31.
This matters because finance is not an add-on to climate diplomacy. It has been a critical component in the Paris Agreement itself, and is the foundation of trust. Without predictable, accessible, grant-based and public finance, many developing countries cannot implement ambitious mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, or Just Transition strategies at the scale required. Nor can they be expected to absorb the costs of a transition shaped by historic emissions and structural inequalities they did not create. Developed countries cannot just pick and choose whether to provide such finance when it fits their national budget discussions.
The objective agreed at COP30 to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035 must now be underpinned by a delivery plan, as a way of concretising one component of the NCQG, which does not mean re-negotiating it. Adaptation cannot continue to be treated as the poor relation of climate action while floods, heatwaves, droughts and storms intensify. The Baku Adaptation Roadmap, the Belém-Addis Vision and the new adaptation indicators can only achieve their full effect if countries also agree how the means of implementation will be provided.
The finance test is not only inside the UNFCCC. It is also playing out in the multilateral development banks, where European governments hold significant influence. In the days after Bonn, the World Bank abandoned its headline target of allocating 45% of financing to climate-related activities, following pressure from the United States, while leaving its Climate Change Action Plan formally in place. The decision was a reminder that implementation depends not only on pledges made under the UNFCCC, but also on governance choices inside the institutions responsible for financing the transition. For European shareholders, it exposed a simple question: will they use their influence to defend ambitious, climate-resilient development, or allow climate ambition to be gradually diluted within the very institutions expected to finance it?
This is where the EU’s credibility is under particular pressure. With the United States absent, other developed countries may be tempted to reduce their ambition or hide behind uncertainty. They should not. The absence of one major provider does not erase the obligations of others. Nor can the EU claim climate full leadership when some Member States are cutting in parallel climate and development finance or shift more of the burden onto private finance, loans, guarantees and instruments that can worsen debt vulnerabilities.
The EU should arrive at COP31 with a clearer offer: support for the finance work programme; concrete steps toward tripling adaptation finance; stronger contributions to UNFCCC funds, including the Adaptation Fund; and a commitment to improve quality, access, predictability and transparency. It can better use this to build diplomatic and implementation alliances, and avoid the perception that it may hold other key issues hostage through holding back finance. It should also use its voting power and diplomatic weight in the World Bank and other MDBs to defend and strengthen climate finance commitments, not allow them to be watered down in the name of political convenience.
Anything less will make the implementation era look like an empty slogan.
Mitigation: ambition without fossil fuel exit plans is incomplete
Bonn also exposed the limits of current mitigation diplomacy. The large majority of countries, including the EU but also LDCs, AILAC and AOSIS, called for strengthening the Mitigation Work Programme in light of the persistent gap between current emissions pathways and what is needed to keep 1.5°C within reach. That is welcome. The work programme should become a more effective space for cooperation, practical problem-solving and implementation support, not a forum trapped in abstract exchanges.
But negotiations failed to deliver the step change required. Some fossil fuel-dependent countries resisted a stronger and more concrete mandate, despite repeated assurances that the MWP is not about imposing top-down prescriptions on national policy. This leaves a familiar contradiction: governments recognise the mitigation gap, but many still resist naming the fossil fuel transition as the central implementation challenge.
This is why the Santa Marta process is so important. The final outcome report from the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, launched during London Climate Action Week, does more than summarise an event. It marks the emergence of a new diplomatic architecture for fossil fuel phase-out. The report recognises that action is needed both within and beyond the UNFCCC, that existing multilateral forums have not yet generated sufficiently operational instruments to manage the decline of fossil fuels, and that additional mechanisms, initiatives and agreements are needed to close this governance gap.
The Santa Marta Vision points toward a much more practical conversation than the one governments have often been willing to have inside the formal negotiations. It identifies the need to align the transition with the 1.5°C limit, address fossil fuel production and use, support fossil fuel-dependent countries, and confront structural barriers including debt, limited fiscal space, high capital costs, technological constraints, trade rules and economic dependence on fossil fuels. Crucially, the report identifies interest in a dedicated international instrument, framework or transparency mechanism focused on the transition away from fossil fuels, including the possibility of a binding fossil fuel treaty that could establish commitments to phase out fossil fuels and end new licensing.
It remains an important task in the run-up to, and also after, COP31, how the set of negotiation and discussions streams directly relevant to mitigation discussions – in particular the MWP, the Global Implementation Accelerator, the “Belém Mission to 1.5”, the Climate Action Agenda – can be brought to increased impact, of course in the context of a wider package of COP decisions addressing the other critical elements including finance, just transition and adaptation.
This should change how the EU reads the road to COP31. Santa Marta is not an external advocacy moment to be politely welcomed and then ignored. It is evidence that the fossil fuel transition agenda is beginning to develop its own diplomatic infrastructure outside the consensus deadlocks of the UNFCCC, while still seeking to complement and strengthen the formal process.
The implications are clear. The COP30 Presidency’s roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, the Santa Marta process, and the forthcoming second conference in Tuvalu in 2027 should be treated as complementary spaces that can feed political momentum back into the UNFCCC, including the Global Stocktake cycle. But their value will depend on whether they move beyond dialogue and begin confronting the structural barriers that keep countries locked into fossil fuel dependence.
Tuvalu now becomes a key checkpoint: the moment when governments must begin turning political recognition into implementation. That means reshaping the wider economic conditions of the transition: building fossil-free trade rules that support rather than punish developing-country green industrialisation; reforming MDBs and international financial institutions so they no longer finance or enable fossil fuel expansion; addressing debt, fiscal space and high capital costs; and ensuring technology transfer, public finance and just transition support are available at the scale required.
A fair transition away from fossil fuels will not be delivered by energy policy alone. It requires changing the trade, finance and investment systems that continue to reward extraction, lock in fossil infrastructure and constrain the policy space of developing countries. By Tuvalu 2027, governments should be expected to show not only that they support the principle of transitioning away from fossil fuels, but that they are prepared to redesign the international cooperation architecture needed to make that transition possible.
For the EU, the expectation is becoming unavoidable: it needs a roadmap to exit fossil fuels. Not simply a renewables target. Not simply an emissions target. A credible framework for phasing out fossil fuel production, consumption, infrastructure dependency and subsidies in line with equity, 1.5°C and Europe’s fair share of the remaining carbon budget. Without such a roadmap, the EU’s mitigation diplomacy will continue to be undermined by the perception that it is asking others to transition faster than it is willing to plan at home.
By Tuvalu 2027, the EU should be able to show how its own fossil fuel exit is being planned, financed and implemented, and how its external partnerships support rather than constrain the ability of developing countries to do the same.
Presidency leadership: electrification cannot substitute for fossil fuel phase-out
Bonn also raised uncomfortable questions about the political direction being provided by the COP31 leadership. With COP31 expected to carry forward critical decisions on the Belém-Antalya Mechanism, climate finance, mitigation, fossil fuel transition and adaptation, the Turkish Presidency and Australia’s role in steering the negotiations should already be creating clearer landing zones for Antalya. Instead, observers were left with the impression of a presidency arrangement that has not yet matched the scale of the political moment. COP31 cannot simply be branded as an “implementation COP” without identifying what implementation means, who must move, who must be supported, and which structural barriers need to be dismantled.
The announced direction in the COP31 Action Agenda towards a global electrification target – 35% of final energy by 2035 – is a welcome initiative that deserves a serious consideration. However, it should complement, not replace, sharper political leadership and concrete action to phase out fossil fuels, while accelerating renewable energy deployment and energy efficiency. a. A global electrification goal could help focus attention on one of the most important shifts required in the global energy transition: replacing fossil fuel combustion in transport, heating, cooling, cooking and industry with efficient electric systems. To deliver real climate benefits, electrification must be renewable-based and accompanied by ambitious energy efficiency measures, rapid deployment of renewable energy, and a clear pathway to phase out fossil fuels and their subsidies. Done well, electrification can lower energy demand, improve air quality, reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets and accelerate renewable energy deployment. The proposal has already attracted positive recognition from a number of countries, including the EU, UK and Canada, but its credibility will ultimately depend on whether it secures participation from major emerging economies and whether it is accompanied by measures that directly address fossil fuel production and use. And there are more discussions needed on its details, and how it might be anchored in COP31 outcomes. It also must complement- not be a substitute- for country-specific ambitious renewable energy and energy efficiency targets which CAN Europe regards as critical for the EU for the period to 2040, as an additional driver for the post-2030 energy transition.
But electrification is only climate-positive if it is explicitly tied to a rapid shift to 100% renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, public-interest grids. system flexibility with storage and demand side response ,and universal access to affordable clean energy. Electrification that locks in fossil gas power, prolongs coal generation, relies on false solutions, or creates new extractive dependencies would not deliver the transition at speed and scale governments have promised.
That also means the implementation actions towards such a target, for it to be successful, should be underpinned by clear justice and integrity guardrails: no new fossil fuel infrastructure, no back door for gas, no delay to fossil fuel phase-out, and no displacement of communities in the name of “clean” supply chains. It must also address transition minerals equity: Indigenous Peoples’ rights, community consent, benefit-sharing, circular economy, recycling, demand reduction, and support for developing countries to move up the value chain rather than remain locked into raw material extraction. Not all of this may be immediately agreed upon in a multilateral consensus already at COP31, and a lot of it comes down to how national implementation will take place, but the Paris agreement’s goals and principles and subsequent COP decisions, including the just transition principles agreed, provide a clear starting point for these parameters countries have already committed to.
The Presidency should therefore use the electrification target as one pillar of a wider fossil fuel transition package: credible national fossil fuel transition roadmaps with milestones, 100% renewable energy, energy efficiency, fossil-free trade, scaled up and reformed finance, and just transition support. The roadmaps being developed under the COP30 Presidency provide an opportunity to give practical expression to the commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, and should evolve beyond high-level political statements into implementation tools that help countries identify concrete pathways, financing needs and international cooperation opportunities. Anything less risks turning a potentially useful Action Agenda announcement into another voluntary initiative disconnected from the hard political choices COP31 must confront.
Trade and industrial policy: the next justice frontier
The first Climate and Trade Dialogue in Bonn showed that trade is no longer a peripheral issue in climate diplomacy. Developing countries have legitimate concerns that trade measures designed in wealthy economies may, if inadequately designed, transfer the costs of industrial decarbonisation onto poorer countries, restrict development pathways or reproduce unequal positions in global value chains.
At the same time, trade policy, industrial strategy and climate cooperation are inseparable from implementation. The transition will require renewable energy supply chains, clean technology deployment, critical minerals governance, public procurement, industrial upgrading, technology transfer and new forms of cooperation. The question is whether these systems will support a global green industrialisation agenda or deepen existing inequalities.
The Santa Marta outcome sharpened this point. A just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels cannot be reduced to national energy planning. It requires confronting the structural barriers that stop countries from moving: debt, fiscal constraints, unfair trade rules, high capital costs, technology gaps, dependency on fossil fuel revenues and exposure to investment arbitration. These issues sit across the UNFCCC, WTO, MDBs, debt architecture, tax negotiations and industrial partnerships. That is why climate diplomacy must become more economically literate, and economic diplomacy must become more climate-just.
The EU should approach this debate with care. It has influence over trade rules, financial institutions, development partnerships, investment frameworks and technology standards. It also has a responsibility to ensure that its climate measures are not arbitrary, protectionist or blind to unequal capacities. A more constructive EU offer would link climate diplomacy with debt justice, fiscal space, technology cooperation, MDB reform, public finance and support for domestic value creation in partner countries.
This is not about diluting climate ambition. It is about making ambition politically and economically possible.
Middle powers and the future of implementation diplomacy
The days after Bonn reinforced the same picture. London Climate Action Week, the launch of the Santa Marta outcome report, and the Ministerial on Climate Action co-convened by the EU, China and Canada in Brussels all pointed to a climate diplomacy landscape increasingly shaped by middle powers, coalitions and issue-specific alliances.
This is not inherently a problem. In a fragmented world, coalitions of the willing can test ideas, build trust and generate momentum where universal consensus is blocked. Brazil’s role on fossil fuel roadmaps, Colombia and the Netherlands’ leadership in Santa Marta, Tuvalu and Ireland’s upcoming role, Canada’s emphasis on clean competitiveness, Southeast Asia’s critical role as a green industrial leader, and the EU’s convening power all show that the absence of the United States does not mean the absence of climate diplomacy.
But coalition diplomacy also carries risks. It must not become a substitute for obligations under the UNFCCC. It must not allow wealthy countries to cherry-pick initiatives while avoiding finance commitments. And it must not undermine the legitimacy of universal multilateralism, especially for countries that depend on the UNFCCC precisely because it is one of the few spaces where all Parties have a voice.
The task ahead is therefore not to choose between formal multilateralism and coalitions of implementation. It is to connect them. The UNFCCC should set the principles, obligations, accountability frameworks and universal political direction. Coalitions can help build the practical pathways, demonstrate feasibility and bring solutions back into the process.
That is the real lesson from Bonn. COP31 will not succeed through voluntary declarations alone, and neither through lowest common denominator COP decisions which potentially fail to achieve urgently needed progress towards the Paris Agreement’s goals. It will succeed if governments can bridge the widening gap between implementation rhetoric and delivery: finance that reaches the right places; a Just Transition Mechanism that supports people and communities; mitigation cooperation that confronts fossil fuel production and consumption directly; trade rules that enable rather than obstruct just transition; MDB governance that protects climate-resilient development; and a climate diplomacy architecture that is both more effective and more just.
Bonn showed that the pieces are beginning to move. Antalya will show whether governments are prepared to put them together. And Tuvalu will test whether the world is ready to move from talking about the fossil fuel transition to actually building the international cooperation framework needed to deliver it.