Activist Greta Thunberg arrives at UN climate talks in Turkey

Prominent climate change activist Greta Thunberg arrived Tuesday at the UN climate meeting, where she emphasised the need to protect people and the planet over profits and power.

This year’s meeting – called the Conference of the Parties, or Cop31 – comes after a year of climate-induced heatwaves and other disasters.

As she arrived at the meeting venue in Antalya, Turkey, Thunberg, 23, said climate change is “threatening everything” and that “everything and everyone we love is at stake”.

“We should act to protect and benefit people rather than constantly sacrificing the global majority and the very planet we are all living on, for a fortunate few to keep making unimaginable profits and maintaining geopolitical power,” she told reporters.

Thunberg is attending her first UN climate summit since she took part in the 2021 Cop meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, where she dismissed promises made by global leaders as “blah, blah, blah”.

In 2024, she participated in a protest rally in Georgia against Azerbaijan hosting that year’s climate talks.

Thunberg accused Azerbaijan of using that summit to “greenwash their crimes and human rights abuses”.

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Thunberg is expected to join this year’s talks for a few days. She said structural changes are needed across the world to deal with the climate crisis because current political and economic systems “have become incompatible with human nature”.

On Tuesday, the EU’s top climate official admitted that expectations were “low” from the summit, while holding out hope for “meaningful” progress on the topic of clean electricity.

“Expectations are low, that’s just a reflection of reality,” European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told a group of reporters in Brussels, arguing that electrification should be the core focus of the talks.

“If indeed we manage to make electrification the sole focus, or close to the sole focus of the Cop, I think we have a chance to deliver on something that is truly meaningful,” he said.

The commissioner will travel to Antalya on Monday for the talks, which run until November 20.

Turkey is inviting countries to join a voluntary “electrification” pledge to raise the share of global energy demand met by electricity from around 20 per cent today to 35 per cent by 2035.

But the EU’s call for “clean” electrification could spark debate over the role of oil, gas and coal in the Turkish proposal.

Observers expect few major breakthroughs as countries grapple with an oil price shock and geopolitical tensions fuelled by the US war with Iran and Russia’s conflict in Ukraine.

The talks are also missing a major player since US President Donald Trump, who pulled Washington out of the Paris climate agreement, has not sent officials to the talks.

“The larger picture is that the geopolitics of the times we live in are extremely complicated,” said Hoekstra, who acknowledged that a string of recent Cop meetings had been “underwhelming in terms of their delivery”.