Renewable sources of energy are on the rise around the world, from solar panels paired with battery storage to rapid electric vehicle adoption. Countries are expanding the share of energy coming from these cleaner sources when compared to fossil fuels, particularly outside of the US.

But there is a split screen between the speed and progress of the clean energy transition and the slow pace of climate diplomacy. When countries around the world gather in Antalya, Turkey, on Nov. 9 for this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP31, they’re likely to find themselves in talks driven by longstanding tensions between industrialized nations (which are responsible for most global warming to date) and the developing world.

Experts say that balance between talks and action is less out-of-whack than it may initially appear, however. There’s progress being made, both at the negotiating table and in the real world. The talks lay some of the foundation for the growing reliance on renewables and provide a much-needed push to reduce carbon and methane emissions, they said.

The focus this year at COP is on implementing existing agreements, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, which is likely to put pressure on negotiators to make commitments on helping developing nations to finance their energy transition and compensate them for climate damages. These are two especially thorny issues at these meetings, with relatively scant progress made on them in previous years.

This doesn’t mean that COP meetings are unimportant. Experts say such summits are especially valuable for pushing countries to carve out their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Paris Agreement operates on two tracks — negotiations and action — and it has delivered important progress on both,” said Rick Duke, who served as the deputy US special envoy for climate change during the Biden administration. “On the action front, for example, in 2021 over 100 countries joined the Global Methane Pledge and a declaration to end deforestation,” he said.

China and Brazil, in particular, have made progress, Duke said. China now includes methane in its national targets and newly-reelected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is pushing forward on plans to end Amazon deforestation. “That said, the process needs to do a better job holding countries accountable for their national targets and focusing attention on the “emergency brake” solutions like methane and forests that can cut warming fastest,” he said.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and climate research lead at Stripe, said the steep decline in the costs of clean energy sources has helped to lower the severity of expected warming during the coming decades compared to projections made just a few years ago.

But how much of this was an achievement of decades of COP meetings, as opposed to favorable economic factors and actions countries would have taken anyway, is not entirely clear, he said.

“It is difficult to separate out this progress from action countries may have taken in relation to the climate talks themselves, and simply the economics of renewables becoming far cheaper over time,” Hausfather said. “The COP process is sort of like the figurehead on top of all of the hard work that’s actually happening.”The bottom line is that neither the policy discussions in Turkey nor global renewables deployment are happening fast enough to avert perilous amounts of further warming.

A UN report released last month, for example, warned that the world will soon overshoot the 1.5-degree Celsius warming target contained in the Paris Agreement, and that our best hope is to limit further warming, slash emissions and cool temperatures back down as quickly as possible.