‘Everything and everyone we love is at stake’: Thunberg slams COP31 talks

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has condemned the United Nations climate talks as hypocritical and urged world leaders to put people and planet ahead of profits and power.

Thunberg made the comments on Tuesday as she arrived at the COP31 conference in the Turkish resort city of Antalya.

“It’s a hypocrisy every year that the host countries are given an opportunity to whitewash themselves and we know that these negotiations are filled with lobbyists, paid by the very destructive industries which are benefiting from our extremely violent status quo,” Thunberg said.

“Our political and economic systems that have become incompatible with human nature.”

The talks follow a year of deadly climate-related disasters, including heatwaves and floods, and another energy shock caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

COP31 co-hosts Turkiye and Australia are promoting renewable energy and rooftop solar installations, but both still rely heavily on fossil fuels, especially coal, to generate electricity. Previous hosts, including Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, are major oil producers.

Climate change is “threatening everything”, Thunberg said, warning that “everything and everyone we love is at stake”.

“We should act to protect and benefit people rather than constantly sacrificing the global majority and the very planet we are all living on, for a fortunate few to keep making unimaginable profits and maintaining geopolitical power,” she said.

Thunberg rose to prominence in 2018 as a 15-year-old, when she began a solitary “School Strike for Climate” outside the Swedish parliament.

The Antalya summit is the first she has attended since the 2021 talks in Glasgow, Scotland, where she dismissed world leaders’ promises as “blah, blah, blah”.

She has also campaigned for other causes, including the Free Palestine movement, and more recently backed French students protesting for more school resources.

Her arrival in Antalya has created excitement among many of the youth climate activists at COP31 who are demanding more climate finance.

“I hope that Greta’s presence here reminds us of why we started this work in the first place: to push for meaningful change, hold decision-makers accountable, and work towards a better future for all of humanity,” Amber Turner, a 26-year-old fellow with the Alliance of Small Island States, told The Associated Press news agency.

Qiyun Woo, a youth environmentalist from Singapore, said Thunberg’s “powerful” presence “adds to calls from a generation that inherits the consequences of these negotiations”.

COP31 runs in Antalya until November 20.

Next year’s edition, COP32, is scheduled to take place in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, in November 2027.