Cop31 live: world leaders gather for crucial climate crisis talks

Key events26m agoWelcome to Cop31 …Fiona HarveyAmong the 70,000 registered attenders at today’s Cop will be civil society groups, Indigenous people from around the world, lawmakers from many countries, representatives of subnational governments, businesspeople and investors working on clean energy - and a number of fossil fuel lobbyists, whose repeated presence and influence at the annual “conference of the party” meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has sparked protest.Though Turkey is hosting, Australia will preside over the formal agenda of negotiations, under a compromise agreed last year when both countries bid for the right to hold the meeting.Welcome to Cop31 …Hello, and welcome to the live blog for Cop31, this year’s UN climate summit. I’m Ajit Niranjan, the European environment correspondent – I’ll be running the liveblog from Berlin over the next two weeks while my colleagues in Antalya, Turkey, bring us updates from where the action is. We’re looking forward to guiding you through a hectic fortnight of planetary significance.More than 90 heads of state and government, along with ministers and senior officials from close to 190 countries, are expected to descend on Turkey’s coastal city of Antalya this week, for the latest round of UN climate talks. Against a backdrop of rapidly rising temperatures and extreme weather, supercharged by fossil fuels, and fractious geopolitics, made worse by soaring inflation owing to the Iran war, the fortnight-long meeting will focus on “implementation” of the world’s targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and help those stricken by the climate crisis.