Cop31 leaders urge world to accelerate fight against global warming

Leaders of ⁠the Cop31 climate summit urged the world to accelerate the fight against global warming as rising temperatures and an increasing number of climate-driven disasters threaten lives and the global economy, as the annual meeting began in Turkey on Monday.

The comments at the start of the two-week UN conference were an appeal to governments to focus on climate, even as other international crises from war to soaring inflation and the uncertainty of AI compete for their attention.

“The urgency of this moment must drive us ‌forward,” UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said in prepared remarks for the opening of the event on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, adding that progress so far was “nowhere near fast enough”.

A report by the United Nations Environment Programme published in October said the world was already set to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial times, the threshold set at the 2015 Paris climate summit to avoid the worst consequences of warming.

This year is on track to be one of the four hottest on record, driven by a powerful El Nino, a UN report showed on Monday. The year has also stood out with a series of extreme heatwaves across western Europe and a glacier collapse in Nepal that triggered a catastrophic flood killing more than 1,450 people, ⁠with thousands still missing.

Turkey’s Cop31 presidency has focused this year’s summit on a goal to electrify more than a third of the global economy by 2035, up from around a fifth today. ‌It is asking nations to sign onto a pledge supporting that target.

Theoretically, such a goal could help reduce planet-warming emissions by speeding the global shift away from fossil fuel-powered vehicles, furnaces, boilers, cooking stoves, and other greenhouse gas-emitting equipment.

“We want people to feel the results of climate talks in daily life: in buildings ‌that use less energy, in clean public transport, in energy they can afford and in new jobs,” Turkey’s Cop31 President Murat Kurum said in prepared remarks.

But climate ⁠advocates have criticised the pledge because it does ⁠not require the additional electricity to come from low-carbon sources, setting up an early fight over whether electrification alone should count as climate progress.

The Iran war has underscored the world’s attachment to fossil fuels, as has Russia’s invasion of ‌Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions on Moscow’s energy exports, though some say the wars have also shown the benefits of moving to renewables.

The Iran war, now in its ninth month, severely disrupted Middle East oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, lifting fuel prices ‌around ‌the globe and prompting a scramble for new supplies.

US President Donald Trump’s administration – which is shunning climate talks for the second year running – has encouraged policies maximising oil, gas, and coal production to address ‌the Mideast disruptions.

South Korea, India, Thailand and other Asian nations, meanwhile, have also increased their reliance on coal or taken steps to boost coal-fired power generation.

“A lot of people who previously might have ⁠been embarrassed to argue for continuing very high use of fossil fuel are now feeling empowered to make that case,” said John Holdren of Harvard University, who was a science adviser to Barack ⁠Obama when he was US president.

At the same time, the deployment of renewable energy has also risen, driven by surging exports of cheap clean tech from China, cheering advocates for ambitious climate action.

Stiell told the summit renewables were the clear answer to improving energy security.

“This year’s fossil fuel cost chaos has delivered a global shock wave, hitting households hard and ‌spreading inflation like a cancer,” he said.

“But the solutions ‌are clear,” he added, saying renewable energy installations had saved the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

The rapid roll-out of AI is also complicating talks, driving a surge in global power demand and contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Turkey will call on governments, businesses and other institutions at Cop31 to sign a pledge outlining principles to ensure AI is developed and deployed sustainably.

Chris Bowen, Australia’s president of Cop31 negotiations, said he hoped the conference would show the world that multilateralism works.

“Paris is working,” he said, referring to the landmark 2015 deal to limit global warming. “But we must move faster.”