The UN secretary-general did not soften his message when heads of state gathered on the Turkish Riviera on Wednesday. “The brutal truth is that the climate crisis is outrunning us,” António Guterres told the leaders segment of COP31 in Antalya, warning that the current pace of action points towards “mutually assured destruction”.
He listed the evidence: record emissions in 2025 and four consecutive years that were the hottest on record. Coal, oil and gas, he argued, belong in the age of the dinosaurs, except that those ancient reptiles never had lobbyists working for them. He also framed fossil dependence as an economic trap, noting that three-quarters of humanity lives in importing countries exposed to price shocks they cannot control, a pointed reference to the oil spike caused by the war involving Iran.
The guest list says a lot about the state of climate diplomacy. Host Recep Tayyip Erdogan was joined by Brazil’s Lula, the emir of Qatar, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian and, for the EU, Ursula von der Leyen. Absent were Germany’s Friedrich Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the leaders of Canada and Japan, leaving Britain’s premier Andy Burnham, due to speak on Thursday, as the only G7 head of government. Washington, for its part, has sent nobody for two years running.
Turkey wants the final deal built around electrification, with power supplying 35 percent of global energy use by 2035, up from just over a fifth today. Critics point out that the plan says nothing about how that electricity is generated, which is why the EU insists it must be clean.
The stakes are clear. According to an October assessment by the United Nations, warming is heading past the 1.5C threshold, and 2026 has already brought severe heatwaves in Western Europe and a deadly glacier-triggered flood in Nepal.
