COP31 summit leaders urge world to move faster on climate

Leaders of the COP31 climate summit urged the world to accelerate the fight against ​global warming amid rising temperatures and worsening climate-driven disasters, as the annual meeting began in Turkey on Monday. The comments at the start of the two-week 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 artificial intelligence 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, adding that progress so far was “nowhere near fast enough.” A report by the United Nations Environment Programme published in October said the world ​was already poised to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial times, the threshold set at the 2015 Paris climate summit to avoid the worst consequences of warming. This ​year is on track to be one of the four hottest on record, driven by a powerful El Nino, a UN report showed on Monday.