COP31: Your morning brief

The 31st Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence start­ed in An­talya, Türkiye this morn­ing. Here are five things you should as world lead­ers meet to ne­go­ti­ate a way for­ward on the cli­mate cri­sis:

1) 70,000 peo­ple are reg­is­tered to at­tend COP31. They in­clude civ­il so­ci­ety groups, In­dige­nous peo­ple, law­mak­ers, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of sub­na­tion­al gov­ern­ments, busi­ness­peo­ple and in­vestors.

2) Sev­er­al “cli­mate lead­ers” a no-show. While the fo­cus is on who is here in An­talya, the ab­sence of some lead­ers is glar­ing. Em­manuel Macron of France, Friedrich Merz of Ger­many and Mark Car­ney of Cana­da all claim to be cli­mate lead­ers. They will not at­tend.

3) Turkey’s en­vi­ron­ment min­is­ter, Mu­rat Ku­rum, who will serve as the COP31 pres­i­dent asked ne­go­tia­tors to “re­place de­lay with ac­tion and bring cli­mate ac­tion in­to peo­ple’s lives.”

4) The Unit­ed Na­tions Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change Ex­ec­u­tive Sec­re­tary, Si­mon Stiell, takes a swipe at the oil and gas in­dus­try. He said, “This year’s fos­sil fu­el cost chaos has de­liv­ered a glob­al shock wave, hit­ting house­holds hard and spread­ing in­fla­tion like a can­cer.”

5) The World Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WMO) said in its State of the Glob­al Cli­mate this morn­ing heat is ac­cu­mu­lat­ing in Earth’s sys­tems at an ac­cel­er­at­ing rate with 2026 on track to be one of the four warmest years on record.

Guardian Me­dia’s Ryan Ba­choo and Seigo­nie Mo­hammed are on the ground in Türkiye.