About 90 000 people from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Türkiye’s coastal city of Antalya for the 31st UN climate summit amid global demands for more concrete decisions than grand declarations.
With a strong El Niño threatening to worsen hunger and poverty in developing countries such as Malawi and its neighbours, negotiators from 198 State parties to the UN climate treaty face crunch talks over climate finance, clean energy and how to protect vulnerable communities.
The summit started on Sunday and is expected to close on Friday next week in the Mediterranean city.
Activists and Least Developed Countries want CoP31 to turn decades of climate promises into action as extreme weather impacts worsen worldwide.
“Progress is nowhere near far enough or fair enough,” UN Climate Change chief Simon Stiell said on Monday.
He urged countries to supercharge their ambitions and solutions that can make a difference on the ground.
“No CoP is a silver bullet,” he said. “No single conference can bridge the chasm between the science and reality.”
Türkiye’s Environment Minister Murat Kurum, the CoP31 president, challenged participants to turn existing commitments into action.
“Our decisions must take shape in a city’s infrastructure, on a farmer’s land and along a factory’s production line. Families must feel their impact in lower energy bills,” he said.
Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will oversee negotiations under an unusual co-presidency arrangement agreed last year during CoP30 in Belém, Brazil.
“We know there will be a difference of views—on the value of the decision, on its elements, on how far we go. But our job is to work to close those differences and provide the most ambitious, most outcome-orientated decision that consensus will allow,” Bowen stated.
Monday marked Food, Agriculture and Health Day, highlighting the growing climate change toll on human health.
Between 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports.
Extreme heat, floods and shifting weather patterns are already putting lives at risk and straining health systems worldwide, the UN agency reports.
“The main character at the centre of this story is not the atmosphere. It’s not the land, the ocean or the ice. It’s us—you and me, our family and our communities,” said Alan Dangour, from the Wellcome Trust Foundation.
He urged climate negotiators at the global conference to put people at the heart of their decisions.
Scientists are increasingly concerned about the links of extreme heat to premature births and stillbirths, while outdoor workers, children and older people face troubling risks too.
Meteorologists and health professionals are working together to reduce some of those risks.
Through a joint initiative with WHO, climate information is being brought into public health planning. A forecast of dangerously high temperatures, for example, can help hospitals prepare for more patients, while rainfall and seasonal predictions can help health authorities anticipate outbreaks of diseases such as malaria.
Joy Shumake-Guillemot, who leads World Meteorological Organization’s partnership with WHO, told UN News: “The weather information is very practical, it is directly relevant to the decisions being made in the health sector, but they often don’t have access to it.
“From a public health perspective, almost all heat deaths are actually preventable.”
Health is one of the 10 priority areas of CoP31’s Action Agenda, amplifying the Belém Health Action Plan agreed at CoP30. The hosts will launch a new Antalya Initiative for Health Resilience.
Also on the agenda is food and agriculture, which account for roughly one third of global greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.
The sector is also highly vulnerable to climate change, as rising temperatures, droughts and floods threaten crops and the livelihoods of millions of farmers. With El Niño expected to intensify in the coming months, experts warned that farmers need support now, not after years of planning and paperwork.
