COP31: UN chief, US mayors, Greta and Lula crowds

From the UN chief slamming fossil fuels to American mayors showing up in place of the US administration and cheering crowds for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, here's what's happened Thursday at the COP31 summit.

The UN's annual climate conference, which started on Monday, runs until November 20 in the Turkish Mediterranean resort city of Antalya.

'Absurd' oil profits

In an exclusive interview with AFP, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres slammed soaring fossil fuel profits as "morally unacceptable."

Guterres said it was "absurd" that nine oil majors would reap $95 billion in profits in a single quarter while ordinary people struggled to afford heating and fuel amid an energy crisis fueled by the Iran war.

"Governments need to protect the interests of their peoples — not the interests of a group of companies," he said at his final climate summit after a decade at the helm of the United Nations.

US absent but present

President Donald Trump, who pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, is unsurprisingly absent from the talks and sent no representative.

But former secretary of state and climate envoy John Kerry, former vice president Al Gore, and several governors and mayors made the trip to Antalya.

"Our message at COP is clear: mayors are closest to the people we serve, and when Washington steps back, we step up," said Vicki Veenker, mayor of Palo Alto, California.

The Americans snubbing the talks are "not any fun anyway," joked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat whose party triumphed in last week's US midterm elections.

Lula limelight

Lula, who narrowly won re-election last month, got a warm welcome from a cheering crowd at a civil society event.

Environmentalists praise the veteran leftist, 81, for slashing deforestation in the Amazon and creating an Indigenous peoples ministry.

Lula "has always shown he cares about the environment" and is "a symbol of the struggle and the fight against climate change", said Mexican student Sebastian Hernandez.

The Brazilian leader, who survived throat cancer in 2011, opted not to give two scheduled speeches Wednesday because of his throat.

In a hoarse voice, he spoke at the end of Thursday's event on his first-ever COP, in 2009.

"I was stunned to see that people didn't take protecting the environment seriously," he said.

"The word impossible doesn't exist in my life," he added to applause.

Thunberg back

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who had not attended a UN climate summit in years, made her way to Antalya, by train and bus, apparently, and warned the climate crisis was "already a matter of life and death."

"The planet is not dying, it is being killed," the Swedish activist told reporters, a day after calling the annual gathering a "greenwashed circus."

Disruption

The conference has been plagued by transport problems, with events having to be cancelled due to delayed arrivals and missing delegates.

"You can imagine people sitting on buses for five hours is just unimaginable. It's had a huge impact on the work inside, especially when delegates are supposed to be in meetings, in negotiations," Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network civil society alliance, told AFP.

Climate security

Britain already has a climate minister, Katie White, but Prime Minister Andy Burnham told fellow world leaders that he had appointed a special envoy focused on climate security.

"Climate is a national security issue," said Burnham.

"As evidence of that," the prime minister said, he had appointed Madeleine Alessandri, the former head of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee — the body that briefs ministers on security threats — to the post.

While countries often have climate envoys whose roles include climate security, Britain is the first to establish a separate job focused on the issue, said Cosima Cassel, an expert at climate think-tank E3G.

Blowing past 1.5C

COP31 was given a fresh warning that global temperatures were likely to blow past the world's target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

The planet is heading towards an "irrecoverable overshoot" of 1.5C unless governments rapidly cut emissions and abandon their support for the fossil fuel industry, according to Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific monitoring group.

Nations agreed at the 2015 UN climate talks in Paris to keep global warming "well below" 2C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C to avert the worst impacts of global warming.

Few major breakthroughs are expected at COP31 as countries face an energy crisis and geopolitical tensions in the wake of wars in Iran and Ukraine. — AFP