UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told world leaders at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya on Wednesday that the slow global response to climate change had put the world on a path to destruction and that fast action was needed to avert it, Reuters reported.
“The brutal truth is that the climate crisis is outrunning us,” Guterres said, pointing to rising emissions and global temperatures and worsening climate-driven disasters.
Speaking later on the third day of the annual UN summit, the leaders of Brazil and Turkey warned that wars and trade disputes should not be allowed to distract the world from tackling global warming.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose country hosted last year’s conference, said the momentum from COP30 had faded at the start of this year and that climate change had disappeared from the speeches and documents of world leaders.
“We started talking more about weapons and tariffs than the survival of future generations,” he said, adding that the planet could not be at the mercy of struggles between powers.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan echoed his comments. “Wars, crises, migration, famine and poverty increase the need for international solidarity each day,” he said.
Their speeches opened a series of addresses by world leaders meant to pave the way for negotiators to reach a new deal to advance the fight against climate change. Negotiators from nearly 200 countries are seeking agreement on a Turkish proposal to increase the share of electricity in global energy use and revive stalled efforts to move away from fossil fuels.
Oil and extreme weather
The US and Israeli war on Iran this year has disrupted crude oil shipments from the Middle East and sent fuel prices soaring around the world, setting off a scramble for reliable supplies. This has pushed global warming down the list of priorities for some governments, although climate campaigners argue it makes the strongest case for switching to clean energy faster.
A UN report last month found the world on course to break through the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit that countries agreed to pursue under the Paris Agreement. This year has also seen a series of extreme heatwaves across Western Europe and a glacier collapse in Nepal that caused a flood that killed more than 1,450 people, with thousands still missing.
Former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, who presided over the 2015 Paris climate conference and leads an advisory council of former COP presidents, told Reuters the leaders’ speeches should give the negotiations political impetus. He said leaders should explain how they will deliver on their commitments, because “the key word in Antalya is implementation”.
Absent leaders
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng and Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine are among dozens of leaders scheduled to speak on Wednesday, but many countries are not represented.
The United States, the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has stayed away from the talks for the second year in a row. President Donald Trump, who has called global warming a hoax, withdrew the US from climate cooperation after returning to office in 2025.
France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada, the other G7 countries, did not send their top leaders this year.
Mohamed Adow, director of the climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa, said the world’s biggest economies “should be leading the response to the climate crisis, not leaving it to others”.
(Reuters)
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