At Midpoint, Annual Climate Summit Leaves Activists With Little To Celebrate

Climate activists are bracing for a letdown as this year’s annual gathering of scientists, politicians, lobbyists, and NGO leaders — known as COP31 — heads into its second and final week at Antalya, Turkey.Advocates of measures to hold down the steady rise in world temperatures, with sometimes unpredictable consequences, lament that trade disruptions and the wars in Iran and Ukraine have pushed climate concerns far down on the agenda of world leaders and complain that representatives of the oil and gas industries are having too much sway.“The first week of the UN summit COP31 has again exposed the lack of urgency among leaders to accelerate the end of fossil fuels despite the escalating climate crisis,” bemoaned the activist group Greenpeace in a statement. The head of its delegation, Jasper Inventor, added that the participating governments “are largely repeating entrenched positions rather than finding ways to bridge their differences. … [They] “recognise the scale of the crisis but remain unwilling to take the decisions necessary to confront it.”Greta Thunberg, the 23-year-old Swedish activist whose outspoken protests made her a world figure at age 15, went further in public remarks upon her arrival at Antalya on Tuesday. “It’s a hypocrisy every year that the host countries are given an opportunity to whitewash themselves and we know that these negotiations are filled with lobbyists, paid by the very destructive industries which are benefiting from our extremely violent status quo,” she said.Among the factors causing glum spirits among the environmentalists is a disappointing turnout by the very world leaders best positioned to impact climate policy. While 37 heads of state and 35 heads of government have made the trek to Antalya — including Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran — the summit has been skipped by every G7 leader except Prime Minister Andy Burnham of the U.K. Also absent is President Xi Jinping of China, whose country accounts for 32 percent of all fossil fuel emissions, according to a study published last week.Campaigners for tougher climate regulations also complained at a rally outside the COP31 venue Saturday that host Turkey and the lead country in the negotiations, Australia, have failed to provide a clear plan for phasing out fossil fuels while opening new coal mines and power plants in their own countries.Inside the venue, the activists worry that their voices are being drowned out by executives and lobbyists from some of the world’s largest producers of the carbon emissions which are blamed for most of the rise in temperatures. More than 100 corporations and industry groups linked to fossil fuel interests have sent delegations to the talks, according to a study from an activist group called “Kick Big Polluters Out.”The summit organizers, Turkey and Australia, deliberately set their sights low for the gathering, aiming to focus on the implementation of previously made pledges rather than to pursue new agreements. Among those promises is one from wealthy nations to raise at least $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developing countries adjust to the impact of rising temperatures.That modest approach appears reasonable, given what United Nations officials describe as a serious shortfall in meeting past commitments. Average world temperatures so far this year are 1.47 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and — driven by an El Nino effect in the Pacific — have recently soared well above the 1.5°C maximum target that was set at COP21 in 2015. “Collective progress in lowering projected emissions remains substantially off track from the reductions required by the science to keep the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C this century within reach and to keep temporary overshoot as short and shallow as possible,” says a United Nations Climate Change report prepared ahead of the summit.A separate study by a U.K.-based digital journalism group, Carbon Brief, reports that public funding to help developing countries cope with climate change has dropped by more than 70 percent this year. The group says most existing pledges expired in 2025, “and since then the US has withdrawn from international climate efforts, and many European aid budgets have been cut.”In their defense, several developed countries have argued that they are constrained by domestic economic pressures, including inflation and fast-rising defense budgets, that have forced them to reallocate some funds or convert grants to loans. They also point to alternative approaches they are taking, such as the shift to electric vehicles.

At Midpoint, Annual Climate Summit Leaves Activists With Little To Celebrate

At Midpoint, Annual Climate Summit Leaves Activists With Little To Celebrate

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