Bourita represents the King as Morocco presses its climate case at COP31

Antalya hears Morocco’s case, delivered in the King’s name

Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita represented His Majesty King Mohammed VI at the Leaders’ Summit of COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, on 11 and 12 November, carrying the Kingdom’s climate case into the room where the world’s leaders had gathered to give the negotiations fresh political momentum. The summit, held under the theme “Towards a Sustainable, Resilient and Equitable Future”, opened the second week of the United Nations climate conference, which runs from 9 to 20 November with nearly 200 countries at the table. On High Instructions of the King, a large Moroccan delegation is taking part in the conference, and Bourita used a visit to the Moroccan Pavilion on Wednesday to set out what Rabat is offering and what it is asking for in return. His message was that Morocco comes to Antalya not as a guest or a recipient, but as a country with concrete answers on the two pillars of the Paris Agreement, cutting emissions and adapting to a warming climate, and with a record in Africa that it wants the summit to build on.

The numbers Rabat put on the table

Morocco has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 53% by 2035, through concrete projects across the energy transition, industry and transport, and to raising the share of renewables above 52% of the country’s electricity capacity by 2030. Bourita called the Kingdom a pioneer in mitigation, and the figures are the centrepiece of the case he carried to Antalya. On adaptation, he pointed to Morocco’s experience in managing water stress, seawater desalination, the water highways that move water between basins, and a tighter, more rational use of resources, alongside farming and the management of natural disasters, all fields where Morocco says it has significant experience to share with other countries.

Beyond its own borders, the Kingdom is carrying the three African climate commissions that grew from the initiatives the King launched when Morocco hosted COP22 in Marrakech in 2016, covering the Sahel region, the Congo Basin and island states. The summit itself is a crowded one: the Turkish presidency said 91 heads of state and government were expected in Antalya, with 77 on the provisional list of speakers, while Environment Minister Murat Kurum holds the COP31 presidency and Australia’s Chris Bowen leads the negotiations. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres used the opening of the Leaders’ Summit to demand that unabated coal be phased out by 2040 and oil and gas use cut by a third, warning that current national plans deliver only about a third of the cuts needed to keep warming to 1.5°C.

The money is where the fortnight will be won or lost. Developed countries are meant to deliver $300 billion a year for developing countries by 2035, a target agreed at COP29, and the COP30 outcome called for adaptation finance to at least triple by 2035; yet the UN Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report, released on 4 November, puts the adaptation needs of developing countries at about $305 billion a year by 2035, and even a tripling would cover only 20 to 29 per cent of them. The African Group of Negotiators has made finance delivery its benchmark for the summit, pressing for grants and concessional funding rather than debt-creating loans, and putting Africa’s needs at $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion by 2030. Morocco’s own opening to the conference, when COP31 opened in Antalya on 9 November, was a blunt warning from the UN’s climate chief that progress is nowhere near fast enough.

What Antalya has not settled yet

No final decision has been reached, and the negotiations run until 20 November, so the shape of the outcome is still open. The first unknown is whether the tripling of adaptation finance will acquire concrete milestones and a baseline against which it can be measured, or remain a direction of travel. The second is whether the $1.3 trillion roadmap for climate finance becomes new money or a repackaging of flows already promised. The third is what Bourita’s bilateral meetings in Antalya produced, since no readout of his conversations on the margins of the summit has been published. The fourth is how far Morocco’s own targets depend on finance that has not yet arrived, and whether the summit will unlock any of it. And the fifth is how the loss and damage fund scales up from its first allocation, $20 million for Nepal after floods that cost $2.69 billion, a gap that has become the cautionary tale of the fortnight.

Why a mid-sized kingdom carries weight in this room

Morocco matters at COP31 because it arrives with a record rather than a wish list. It hosted COP22, it has built one of the world’s most watched renewable programmes, and it has learned to live with water scarcity in ways that other arid countries are now studying. That gives Rabat a credibility in the adaptation debate that few mid-sized countries can match, and it lets the Kingdom speak for Africa without speaking over it. The week matters diplomatically, too. Days after the General Assembly heard broad support for Morocco’s autonomy plan, and as France’s foreign minister heads to Essaouira for talks that prepare a state visit and a treaty without precedent, Morocco is showing a second face in Antalya: a constructive power with solutions to offer, not only positions to defend. And the decision to be represented at leaders’ level, by the foreign minister in the King’s name, signals that the file sits at the very top of the state’s priorities.

Climate as the second front of Morocco’s diplomacy

The timing is the story. The same fortnight that saw the General Assembly debate the veto, the liquidation of a 35-year peacekeeping mission, Bourita’s unannounced trip to Nouakchott and a French minister’s visit to Essaouira now sees Morocco leading on climate, and the two fronts reinforce each other. A kingdom that can show it builds solutions, in energy, in water, in African cooperation, is harder to cast as a party to a frozen conflict, and the King’s decision to be represented at leaders’ level puts climate at the centre of the Kingdom’s external action rather than at its margins. The strategy is to convert climate credibility into diplomatic capital: the COP22 host, the renewables builder, the water manager, the convener of African commissions, all presented as one record in the rooms where Morocco’s positions are weighed. The risk is symmetrical. If Antalya ends in vague language and unmet finance, the credibility Morocco lends the process is spent without return, and the bridge role Rabat claims, between Africa and Europe, between ambition and delivery, narrows to a photo opportunity. Read through the five dimensions that frame this paper’s coverage, geopolitics, economics, demography, history and technology, the move is coherent on every axis. That is why the finance text matters more to Morocco than any speech.

What a finance deal in Antalya would unlock back home

The first consequence is practical. If adaptation finance triples with milestones and dates, Morocco’s desalination plants and water highways stop being national infrastructure and become a service the Kingdom can sell across Africa. The second is industrial: the renewables target above 52% by 2030 needs capital, and the COP31 presidency’s agenda for green industrialisation touches the industry, transport and low-carbon plans Bourita listed in Antalya. The third is political, and it runs the other way. If the finance stalls, the African Group’s faith in the process frays, and the countries Morocco claims to speak for will ask what the bridge delivered. The loss and damage fund’s first payout, $20 million against $2.69 billion in losses, is the number every negotiator in Antalya carries in mind, and the reason the finance text is the fortnight’s real negotiation.

The fortnight that decides whether Antalya delivered

Watch the negotiating text as it hardens towards 20 November: the language on tripling adaptation finance, the assessment of the Green Climate Fund’s replenishment needs, and the work programme on climate finance that the African Group fought to put on the agenda. Watch, too, for announcements from Morocco’s pavilion and for readouts of Bourita’s bilateral meetings, which will show whether the Kingdom’s week produced partnerships as well as positions.