Other than the Australian and Turkish co-hosts, the only G20 nations to address the COP31 leaders’ summit with speakers at the “head of state or government” level will be the UK, Brazil and China, according to a provisional list released on Wednesday.
The list, which is published by the United Nations and subject to change, includes only 77 countries whose leaders are listed to speak at the summit in Antalya on November 11-12. That would be nearly a third fewer than the 116 who spoke at COP28 in Dubai three years ago.
Yvo de Boer, a former head of the UN’s climate secretariat, told Climate Home News that the low turnout and “the absence of many nations that should be showing leadership on climate action and support for developing nations” sends “the wrong signal at a difficult time”.
Amid geopolitical conflicts, a struggling global economy and an inevitable overshoot of the 1.5C global warming limit, de Boer said that “climate action needs a strong show of support, not empty seats at a leaders’ summit”.
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Earlier this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said G20 countries should lead on climate action, adding that while they have varying responsibilities in tackling global warming, “all countries, especially the big emitters, must do more”. As major economies spanning developed and developing nations, G20 countries account for more than three-quarters of annual global emissions.
China is likely to be represented at COP31 by Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang, as in the past three years, rather than President Xi Jinping, who has rarely left China since the COVID-19 pandemic and has not attended a climate COP since Paris in 2015.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is scheduled to speak, after telling parliament in September he would do so as part of his efforts to “meet the climate challenge” following a series of deadly heatwaves.
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Brazil’s President Lula has also said he will attend. Depending on the result of Sunday’s election against his far-right rival Flávio Bolsonaro, he will speak at COP31 as either a recently re-elected or outgoing president.
While the COP31 summit is being hosted by Türkiye in Antalya, Australia has the formal role of President of Negotiations and its prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will speak at the summit. Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not on the UN’s speaker list but is likely to give an opening speech.
Many of the countries whose leaders are due to attend COP31 are those suffering the worst effects of climate change. About a third are African countries and a quarter are small island developing nations. Türkiye’s Central Asian and Balkan neighbours are also well-represented.
COP31 no-shows
Among the major emitters not on the list are French President Emmanuel Macron, German leader Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Canada’s Mark Carney and Japan’s Sanae Takaichi.
Macron, who is struggling to deal with rising social unrest across France, will reportedly attend commemorations marking the end of the First World War and a European Political Community summit instead. It is not known whether the others will eventually decide to attend COP31, or what they will do instead.
Climate change-sceptic US President Donald Trump has never attended a COP and is withdrawing the US from the UN climate convention (UNFCCC), under which COP meetings are held, after quitting the Paris Agreement for a second time.
Argentina’s Javier Milei has considered exiting the Paris Agreement but has so far not done so, although his government is one of around 30 countries yet to submit an updated national climate plan to the UN.
The post Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Scientists behind a landmark UN report on overshooting the 1.5C warming limit have defended its credibility, after Saudi Arabia and other large developing countries questioned its scientific legitimacy and sought to keep it out of the main political decision expected from COP31.
The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Limiting Overshoot report, published in September, examines how to minimise an almost certain breach of the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal, what crossing it will mean for people and ecosystems and how temperatures could be brought back down.
The European Union, the UK, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and small island states are among those pushing for COP31 to make the response to overshoot of 1.5C one of the summit’s priorities.
But during closed-door consultations on the cover decision this week, the Arab Group, led by Saudi Arabia, have tried to cast doubt on the report’s scientific rigour, arguing it had not been peer-reviewed, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
Meanwhile, the bloc of Like-Minded Developing Countries (LDMCs), which included India and China, called for the cover decision to avoid references to reports produced outside the UN climate process, seen by observers as a thinly-veiled reference to the UNEP report.
Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and one of the key architects of the Paris Agreement, said the overshoot report “tells us a truth some would rather hide”.
“We are on course to exceed 1.5C and limiting how far and for how long is a matter of survival for us all,” she told Climate Home News. “The attacks on climate science are an attempt to delay action. They target intergovernmental institutions that give countries a shared scientific basis for acting together.”
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Rigorous approach
Speaking at an event in Antalya on Saturday, scientists involved in the report also pushed back.
Debra Roberts, a South African scientist who co-chaired the IPCC’s Working Group II in its last assessment cycle and was part of the UNEP report’s core coordinating team, said the authors had followed the standard process for a global assessment of existing science, in line with the practices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The only difference, she said, was that governments did not review the outputs.
“It was certainly reviewed internally by the authors, external peer-reviewers were brought into the process, and UNEP also reviewed it,” she told Climate Home News.
Forty-four experts from across the globe authored the report, which largely synthesises existing literature, and their work was scrutinised by a further 44 reviewers in a year-long exercise.
“Let’s be straightforward here: the reports are being attacked because some people don’t like the conclusions and it’s fairly obvious why,” Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics and one of the report’s reviewers, told Climate Home News.
“If you as a government are basing your economy on burning and selling fossil fuels, then the last thing you want to do is accept that we are overshooting 1.5C, because then obviously you will take on some responsibility for paying for the damage,” he added.
“Grey literature” debate
In Antalya, some big emerging economies have also called for “grey literature”, including the overshoot report, to be kept out of the cover decision. The term refers to scientific products that are published outside of traditional academic journals.
While that applies to the UNEP report, some of its authors said it should not mean “grey literature” is of lower quality and cannot be used to inform policy-making.
They added that other forms of “grey literature”, including the UNEP Emissions and Adaptation Gap reports or the work of the International Energy Agency (IEA), are routinely used in the IPCC climate science assessment cycles and sometimes referenced in COP decisions.
Manjeet Dhakal, a Nepalese advisor to the LDCs, told Climate Home News those reports have previously been very useful to inform policy-makers. He added that the overshoot report is comprehensive and countries should be guided by it in Antalya.
‘A distraction’ amid bigger science spat
One of the UNEP report authors said the attempts by some countries to cast doubt on the overshoot report is just “a distraction”.
Clashes over climate science and its role in policy-making have escalated over the last few years amid a long-running stand-off at the IPCC. Most governments want the panel to produce all of its key assessment reports in time to inform the next UN Global Stocktake of climate action, due to be completed in November 2028.
But a smaller group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia, India and Russia, have resisted, claiming that timeline would be too rushed for scientists and governments from developing countries to contribute to and review the reports.
The IPCC will reconvene in an online meeting in early December in a last-ditch effort to find a solution.
As well as the IPCC assessments, Tubiana said the findings of the overshoot report must also inform the next global stocktake.
The post Scientists defend UN overshoot report after Saudi-led push to sideline it at COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Scientists defend UN overshoot report after Saudi-led push to sideline it at COP31
As technical negotiators race to lay the ground for the big political fights coming in the second week of COP31, delegates will spend their Saturday night at a stocktaking plenary presided over by Türkiye and Australia, where countries’ first red lines are expected to emerge.
Countries will have to decide whether to move forward with a cover decision as the main outcome from the Antalya talks. Some large developing countries have pushed back on it all week, as well as on any inclusion of sectoral targets, including a flagship new pledge to increase electrification to 35% by 2035.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell told a press conference on Saturday morning that progress so far has been “constructive” and praised the fact that negotiations were able to start on time as countries avoided what had seemed to be shaping up as a fight over the agenda.
He added that Saturday’s plenary will provide a sense of the most controversial issues, which government ministers now flying will have to take up and settle.
As of now, most issues on the formal agenda still need a lot of work. The cover text is more a wishlist of every proposal tabled and still needs to be worked up into a draft – expected by early next week.
An informal note on the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP), which tackles cutting planet-heating emissions, is heavily bracketed. The EU has said one of its priorities is to extend the MWP, with current options for a timeline going up to 2030, 2031 or 2040 (at COP45!). The MWP has so far delivered weak outcomes, but the current fight is over whether to expand its scope and task it with informing the next Global Stocktake of climate policies in 2028.
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A separate draft text on the global goal on adaptation released overnight is set to become the main battleground for Africa’s top priority to triple adaptation finance to “at least $120 billion per year by 2035”, based on a previous goal set in 2021 – a figure it wants agreed in Antalya.
Another option in the text proposes starting a process to review several elements of this finance target – which was adopted in the final deal at COP30 – including the baseline, the total amount and its scope. It requests this to be reflected in a report that would then be considered at a later summit. African countries are likely to push back on this idea.
An informal note that includes the set-up of a new Just Transition Mechanism also came out late on Friday and has been condemned by civil society groups for the limited scope of what it would be expected to achieve.
In the meantime, the Turkish and Australian co-presidency has continued consultations on a number of issues, including on how to strengthen the UN climate process itself. Some countries – including Arab nations, Mexico, Korea and Switzerland – have proposed switching COPs to a biennial format, instead of the current yearly summits.
Brazil says it wants to host third fossil fuel phase-out conference
Brazilian President Lula da Silva told civil society in Antalya this week that his country should host the third global conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF), which would likely fall in 2028.
“We have the moral obligation,” Lula said at a meeting before heading off to the Philippines for the ASEAN summit. The Brazilian president told the event he came to Antalya to demonstrate that “no country has more credibility on climate” than his.
The first conference on TAFF was held in Santa Marta by a coalition of around 60 governments that decided to take voluntary measures to wean their economies off coal, oil and gas. The next conference is expected to take place mid-next year in Tuvalu, with a pre-conference event for academics, subnational governments and civil society in Dublin.
In Antalya, Brazil’s COP30 presidency held a big launch event for a voluntary global roadmap it produced to help countries shift off fossil fuels, proposing a build-up of clean energy systems followed by a push to start phasing out coal, oil and gas production and consumption after 2031.
Currently, a proposal to welcome the Brazil-led roadmap in the formal UN negotiations is included in the COP31 cover decision, as well as an option for “ongoing implementation” of a COP28 landmark deal to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/14/cop31-bulletin-day-6-limited-progress-as-ministers-arrive-in-antalya/
Climate Change
‘Stop dicking around’: Bowen facing uphill battle amidst insufficient progress at COP31 climate talks
Antalya, Türkiye, Saturday 14 November 2026 — At the midway point of the COP31 climate talks where Australia is chairing negotiations, vital work is still needed to deliver real progress to phase out fossil fuels, protect the 1.5°C temperature goal, and to massively scale-up climate finance.
On Friday, the COP31 Presidency released a ‘summary of reflections’ on the proposed cover decision, providing a ‘Christmas list’ of options for the COP31 outcome, including proposals to advance the transition away from fossil fuels, recognition of the critical role of forests and oceans, and a response to the urgency of 1.5°C overshoot. But these are not yet agreed commitments, and they need to be strengthened in any cover decision, not diluted, says Greenpeace.
Speaking from Antalya, Dr Simon Bradshaw, COP31 Lead at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “It’s time to stop dicking around. Australia must focus on the urgent task of accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuels. We are experiencing rapidly worsening climate impacts, and a crippling cost of living crisis driven by fossil fuel dependence, yet the negotiating rooms are becoming increasingly disconnected from the brutal realities faced by communities all around the world.
“In week two, there is everything left to play for. The COP31 Presidency can deliver an ambitious outcome the world desperately needs, but it’s going to take the very best of us. Our message to the Presidency is: Don’t stuff this up.”
Also in Antalya, Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Now that leaders have departed Antalya we can get down to the urgent work at hand — delivering real progress to end fossil fuels and defend the 1.5°C limit. We must refuse to let these rooms become detached from the Pacific’s reality, where a breached 1.5°C will drown our history and identities, every fraction of a degree of overshoot fuelling more irreversible harm for our communities.
“This crisis requires more than speeches; it requires Pacific courage. True leadership demands bravery to chart a course away from fossil fuels and to stop every new coal, oil and gas project in its tracks. The Presidency must deliver.”
ENDS
COP31 images and video available here in Greenpeace Media Library
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