COP31's 35 by 35 Electrification Target: Can Antalya Turn a Pledge Into a Decision

When nearly 200 countries gather in Antalya on 9 November for COP31, the most concrete number on the table will not be a temperature. It will be a share of energy. The Turkish-Australian presidency wants the world to raise electricity's share of final energy consumption from about 23% today to 35% by 2035, under what it calls the "35 by 35" Global Electrification Pledge. The summit runs from 9 to 20 November, with Türkiye holding the presidency and Australia leading the negotiations, and its leaders' summit is scheduled for 11 and 12 November. Electrification, climate finance, adaptation and resilience are the stated priorities, but the 35% figure is the one that can be checked, argued over, and, in principle, written into a decision.

The case for it is economic as much as environmental. The International Energy Agency's argument, as reported ahead of the summit, is that faster electrification could cut fossil-fuel import bills for importing countries by more than $400 billion a year by 2035. Electricity also uses energy more efficiently than burning fuel: researchers modelling a highly electrified economy have argued it could deliver the same useful energy with about half the primary energy, because electric motors and heat pumps waste far less heat than combustion. That is why the presidency presents electrification not as a green luxury but as the cheapest route to energy security, and why the target has attracted support beyond the usual climate circles.

The momentum is real, and India is the best illustration of it. In its 2025-26 financial year India added a record 55.29 GW of non-fossil capacity, taking its total to 283.46 GW, with solar contributing 44.61 GW and wind 6.05 GW. The International Energy Agency reports that India's renewable capacity has now passed 300 GW, that renewables saved the country more than $100 billion in coal and gas import costs between 2011 and 2025, and that capacity could reach about 530 GW by 2030. On the diplomatic side, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada have welcomed the 35% target, as have the Brazilian COP30 and Ethiopian COP32 presidencies, and the Electrify Now platform backing the pledge counts fifteen countries alongside more than seventy business, research and civil-society groups.

Yet there is a gap between welcoming a target and adopting one, and that gap is where this summit will be decided. The 35 by 35 pledge sits in the presidency's Action Agenda, which is a voluntary, non-binding set of initiatives that does not require formal approval by all parties. A formal cover decision, by contrast, needs consensus among nearly 200 countries, and the presidency's own briefing material places less explicit emphasis on moving away from fossil fuels than previous summits did. The physical challenge is just as stark: electricity still accounts for less than 1% of energy used in road transport, and modelling by the International Council on Clean Transportation puts electricity at only about 6% of road-transport energy by 2035 under current policies, rising to about 11% even under an ambitious zero-emission vehicle scenario. Electrifying buildings and industry at the required speed will need grids, finance and permitting to move together, and the summit's other great argument, over the $1.3 trillion a year in climate finance that developing countries say they need, could easily crowd the target out.

My judgment is therefore narrower than the presidency's ambition. I think COP31's adopted final decision text will explicitly include the 35% by 2035 electrification target, but I put that at only 45%. The support is broad and the number is grounded in IEA and IRENA analysis, which is why the chance is close to even. But the most likely failure mode is not outright rejection; it is dilution, with the target surviving only as a voluntary pledge in the Action Agenda while the formal decision text settles for vaguer language about accelerating electrification. Watch the second week: a numbered electrification paragraph in the draft cover text means the target is becoming law-like, while its absence means Antalya will have produced another well-attended pledge rather than a decision. Either way, the test of 35 by 35 will not be the applause in Antalya. It will be whether, by 2035, the world's energy mix actually looks different.