Navigating the New Climate Diplomacy: How to Maximise Your COP31 Opportunity
- World Climate Foundation
- Jul 24
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 27
What makes COP participation meaningful – and how best can organisations prepare?
Traditionally, COP has been a place for organisations to build their visibility, with this single event dominating climate engagement for two weeks every year. Now, with the focus shifting from negotiation to implementation, organisations need to rethink how they engage. And at the same time, more people than ever are expected to attend this year’s conference, with 100,000 people likely to attend COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye.
Our recent executive briefing with Sagarika Chatterjee, Director of Finance, Technology and Capacity Building at Climate High-Level Champions, and Emil Majidov, Private Advisor to COP31 Climate High-Level Champions, together with our CEO Jens Nielsen, Chief Impact Officer and WCF Brazil Lead Flora Bitancourt, and WCF Africa Lead Matsi Modise, aimed to answer this question.
If you missed the live session, you can now watch the full webinar on demand – it's well worth the hour for anyone shaping their organisation's COP31 strategy.
We've distilled the discussion into five key takeaways – here's how organisations can make sure they get the most out of this engagement.
COP is a year-round process, not an annual event
Many organisations still view COP as a single two-week event, but that approach is becoming outdated.
“Treat the two weeks not just as a single event, but as part of a 12-month cycle,” says Jens Nielsen, CEO of the World Climate Foundation.
Today's climate agenda is shaped through regional climate weeks, coalition meetings, industry working groups and bilateral discussions that continue throughout the year. Months of collaboration will culminate at COP30 in Antalya, while planning for the next COP – COP32 in Ethiopia – has already begun. Along the way, climate weeks in London, Sao Paulo and New York provide some of the most important milestones where organisations can meet their stakeholders and understand where climate negotiations are heading.
What organisations should do:
Develop a year-round engagement strategy that identifies the milestones, partnerships and policy moments leading up to COP, rather than concentrating all activity into November.
COP is now about implementation
One of the strongest themes throughout the webinar was that COP30 marked a turning point in the climate agenda. While the Paris Agreement established the framework for countries to submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs), the challenge now is implementation. The focus will be on mobilising finance, scaling projects and delivering measurable progress.
“We move from negotiations to action,” said Sagarika Chatterjee, summing up the shift.
As Emil Majidov noted, governments create commitments, but business and other non-state actors play a critical role in turning those commitments into investable, bankable projects.
What organisations should do
As COP shifts towards implementation, organisations should ensure that everything they bring to the conference helps move the conversation forward. In previous years, it may have been enough to make commitments; now the expectation is shifting to bringing concrete projects or announcements.
More focus on national priorities
"What we really need... is to see the business and finance community encouraging more NDCs and also national adaptation plans... helping get the finance flowing so that these NDCs and national adaptation plans can really come to life."
— Sagarika Chatterjee, Climate High-Level Champions
Organisations are increasingly expected to demonstrate how they contribute to governments' climate objectives. There is less interest in standalone sustainability stories and more interest in partnership, coordination and collaboration.
Sagarika encouraged businesses to align their work with countries' NDCs and National Adaptation Plans, positioning themselves as partners in implementation rather than external advocates.
What organisations should do:
Before planning your COP programme, understand the priorities of the countries you want to engage. Show how your investments, technologies or expertise help governments achieve their climate goals.
Strategic partnerships take centre stage
"It's part of our theory of change that the impact comes from alliances, from designing solutions together and creating new finance mechanisms for implementation."
— Flora Bitancourt, Chief Impact Officer and Brazil Lead at World Climate Foundation
Climate change is too big for single actors to tackle alone. Rather, progress depends on bringing together governments, businesses, investors, innovators and civil society around shared goals. For organisations attending COP31, success will depend less on the number of meetings they hold and more on the strategic partnerships they build to accelerate implementation.
Jens Nielsen advised delegates to be selective about where they spend their time, prioritising the right stakeholders.
What organisations should do:
Plan your stakeholder engagement before arriving in Antalya. Identify the organisations you most want to meet, understand where your objectives align, and use COP to deepen relationships so that you move from ideas to implementation.
From individual organisations to collaborative ecosystems
"We believe that systemic change needs to happen with cross-sector collaboration with a strong sense of partnership."
— Flora Bitancourt, Chief Impact Officer and Brazil Lead at World Climate Foundation
Overall, climate action is becoming more collaborative.
Flora emphasised the role of coalitions, cross-sector partnerships and shared implementation platforms in accelerating progress. The message was clear: systemic change requires organisations to work together rather than in isolation.
What organisations should do:
Organisations need to be strategic in laying the foundations for the right partnerships. Having like-minded partners on board may prove the most valuable outcome of a COP engagement.
Gaining the most from COP31 is about preparing differently
Over the past two decades, COP has evolved as climate negotiations have matured. Now, it marks the start of the next chapter in international negotiations, adapting from a forum for negotiation into a platform for implementation. Throughout the webinar, speakers emphasised that climate progress will be achieved though implementation, collaboration, and sustained engagement over the months to come. COP is not the end – but it sets the scene for success after the conversations end. Those organisations that thrive will be those who help deliver the solutions.
