Guterres presses climate finance pact as COP31 opens in Antalya

UN Secretary-General António Guterres used his address to the COP31 leaders' summit in Antalya on Wednesday to press for a new climate finance settlement, saying emissions reached a record in 2025 and that the world will overshoot the 1.5C warming limit agreed in Paris.

Guterres said the past four years were the hottest on record, and that the overshoot can still be limited in its scale and duration. He called climate justice "the defining challenge of the next decade" and proposed what he called a Climate Justice Compact resting on shared responsibility, shared security and shared benefits.

Economies outside China that are still developing hold nearly two-thirds of the world's population but receive less than a fifth of global clean energy investment, Guterres said. They also borrow at two to three times the cost faced by richer countries, which slows both the shift to renewables and spending on adaptation, he said.

He asked developed countries to provide at least $300bn a year by 2035 and to triple adaptation finance by the same date, and said the wider $1.3 trillion climate finance goal has to reach developing countries as money they can spend. Renewable capacity should at least triple from 2025 levels by 2035, he said, while unabated coal power falls by at least 75 percent, and every person should be covered by an early warning system against floods, droughts and rising seas.

Nepal, Kyrgyzstan and other mountain countries have used the summit to argue for a separate Himalayan agenda, citing accelerating glacier melt, thawing permafrost and climate-driven disasters. Nepal's recent floods have shown how vulnerable Himalayan communities and infrastructure are, The Kathmandu Post reported. Greater access to adaptation finance, early warning systems and loss and damage support is the priority Kathmandu has set out.

UN News reported that Guterres also urged governments to tax fossil fuel companies to help countries bearing the brunt of a crisis they did little to cause, and that he described the timing as "make or bake time".

The Rio Times reported that the leaders of China, the United States and India skipped the Antalya meeting, and that finance remained the fault line in the negotiations. Guterres warned that geopolitical rivalries and fragmentation could hold the talks back. "Negotiations matter, but success must be measured on the ground," he said.