ANTALYA: Leaders of the COP31 climate summit urged the world to accelerate the fight against global warming amid rising temperatures and worsening climate-driven disasters, as the annual meeting began in Türkiye 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 artificial intelligence compete for their attention. "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 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," Türkiye'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.
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. "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. — Reuters
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