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COP31 Summit: Leaders urge world to move faster on climate – EnviroNews
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Leaders of the COP31 climate summit urged the world to accelerate the fight against global warming, rising temperatures and an increasing number of climate-driven disasters.
Climate disasters threaten lives and the global economy.
The comments at the start of the two-week United Nations (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 at the opening of the event on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
Stiell added that progress so far was “nowhere near fast enough.”
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.
It is asking nations to sign onto 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.
Turkey’s COP31 President, Murat Kurum, said: “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”.
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.
U.S. 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.
John Holdren of Harvard University, who was a science adviser to Barack Obama when he was U.S. president, stated: “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.”
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 that renewables were the clear answer to improving energy security.
He said, “This year’s fossil fuel cost chaos has delivered a global shockwave, hitting households hard and spreading inflation like a cancer.
“But the solutions are clear,” he added, saying renewable energy installations had saved the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars.
The rapid rollout 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, 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.”
