From American mayors showing up in place of the US administration to cheering crowds for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, AFP takes a look at what’s happening Thursday at the COP31 summit. The UN’s annual climate conference, which started on Monday, runs until November 20 in the Turkish Mediterranean resort city of Antalya. – US absent but present – President Donald Trump, who pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, is unsurprisingly absent from the talks and sent no representative.
But various US ex-officials, state and local elected officials made the trip to Antalya, including former secretary of state and climate envoy John Kerry, former vice president Al Gore and several governors and mayors.”Our message at COP is clear: mayors are closest to the people we serve, and when Washington steps back, we step up,” said Vicki Veenker, mayor of Palo Alto, California. The Americans snubbing the talks are “not any fun anyway”, joked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat.”The rhetoric that you hear coming out of Washington is a minority of people,” he said, adding a dig over the Democrats’ success in the US midterm election: “They found out how big a minority it was last week, and that will only continue to grow.” – Lula limelight – Lula, who narrowly won re-election last month, got a warm welcome from a cheering crowd at a civil society event.
Environmentalists praise the veteran leftist, 81, for slashing deforestation in the Amazon and creating an Indigenous peoples ministry. Lula “has always shown he cares about the environment” and is “a symbol of the struggle and the fight against climate change”, said Mexican student Sebastian Hernandez. The Brazilian leader, who survived throat cancer in 2011, opted not to give two scheduled speeches Wednesday because of his throat.
In a hoarse voice, he spoke at the end of Thursday’s event on his first-ever COP, in 2009.”I was stunned to see that people didn’t take protecting the environment seriously,” he said.”The word impossible doesn’t exist in my life,” he added to applause. – Disruption – The conference has been plagued by transport problems, with events forced to be cancelled due to delayed arrivals and missing delegates.”You can imagine people sitting on buses for five hours is just unimaginable.
It’s had a huge impact on the work inside, especially when delegates are supposed to be in meetings, in negotiations,” Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network civil society alliance, told AFP. – Climate security – Britain already has a climate minister, Katie White, but Prime Minister Andy Burnham told fellow world leaders that he had appointed a special envoy focused on climate security.”Climate is a national security issue,” said Burnham.”As evidence of that,” the prime minister said, he appointed Madeleine Alessandri, the former head of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee — the body that briefs ministers on security threats — to the post.
While countries often have climate envoys whose roles include climate security, Britain is the first to establish a separate job focused on the issue, said Cosima Cassel, an expert at climate think-tank E3G.”This appointment elevates that issue to the level it deserves, and other governments should consider a similar model,” Cassel told AFP. – Blowing past 1.5C – COP31 was given a fresh warning that global temperatures were likely to blow past the world’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
The planet is heading towards an “irrecoverable overshoot” of 1.5C unless governments rapidly cut emissions and abandon their support for the fossil fuel industry, according to Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific monitoring group. Nations agreed at the 2015 UN climate talks in Paris to keep global warming “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C.
But the United Nations declared in September that the long-term 1.5C target would be missed in a matter of years. – Thunberg back – Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who had not attended a UN climate summit in years, warned that the climate crisis was “already a matter of life and death”.”The planet is not dying, it is being killed,” the Swedish activist told reporters, a day after calling the annual gathering a “greenwashed circus”.
Few major breakthroughs are expected at COP31 as countries face an energy crisis and geopolitical tensions in the wake of wars in Iran and Ukraine.
Thu, 12 Nov 2026 17:26:46 GMT