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

Résumé détaillé

Climate activist urges world leaders to put people and planet before profit as she arrives at UN climate 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.

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