COP31 Leaders Urge World to Accelerate Climate Action

AFP

Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s environment minister and Cop31 president, addresses delegates on Monday.

Leaders of the COP31 climate summit have called on the international community to step up efforts to combat global warming as rising temperatures and increasingly severe climate-related disasters continue to pose growing challenges. The annual conference opened in Türkiye on Monday.

The appeal, made at the start of the two-week United Nations conference, urged governments to prioritise climate action despite mounting competing pressures, including wars, soaring inflation and growing uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence.

"The urgency of this moment must drive us forward," UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said at the opening of the event on Türkiye'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 poised 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.

It 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.

Türkiye'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, opens new tab 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.

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.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he hoped Türkiye could deliver concrete results.

"Our goal is to make this summit a platform where concrete results are produced, where countries turn their pledges into action, because it is no longer time to make promises that remain on ‌paper," Erdogan ⁠told reporters on a return flight from Azerbaijan, according to a transcript of his comments shared by his office on Monday.

The Iran war has underscored the world's attachment to fossil fuels, as has Russia's invasion of Ukraine, though some say the wars have also shown the benefits of moving to renewables.

Now in its ninth month, the Iran war has 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 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.

At the same time, the deployment of renewable energy has also risen, driven by ⁠surging exports of cheap clean tech from China.

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

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

Türkiye 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.

"Let's show future generations that this generation was equal to the moment, equal to the challenge," he said. 

Source: Reuters



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