World leaders take stage at COP31 but big names missing
World leaders will take the stage at COP31 in Turkey on Wednesday but some prominent names are missing from this year’s annual UN climate summit even as global warming intensifies.
The two-week conference kicked off earlier this week in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, with governments under pressure to tackle the climate crisis after a year of heatwaves in Europe, deadly floods in Nepal and major wildfires in Indonesia.
Dozens of leaders will speak during the “high-level segment” taking place on Wednesday and Thursday, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian.
But observers have pointed to the absence of some big names, with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham the only leader from a G7 country scheduled to address the summit.
While European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen is coming to Antalya, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are skipping the event.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi are also absent from the most recent list.
“It is a shame that some of the bigger European leaders aren’t coming. We need Europe to be showing up strongly at this COP,” Cosima Cassel, a climate diplomacy expert at think-tank E3G, told AFP.
Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s top climate official, said the absences were “not completely atypical” as leaders may have “practical” reasons for not being able to attend a summit.
But he also told reporters in Brussels that “expectations are not necessarily high” for this climate conference.
Iran’s Pezeshkian said he would use the event as an opportunity to express Tehran’s position on environmental destruction in war.
“At this conference, we will speak about the actions of the United States and Israel in destroying the environment,” he said before departing for Turkey, according to Iranian state television.
The French government said Macron would be absent because November 11 is World War I Armistice Day and the president will attend an EU summit in Ireland on Thursday.
“If top leaders want influence over where the global (energy) transition is going, showing up is a pretty good place to start,” said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe.
“I am afraid that Ursula von der Leyen will be lonely on the stage while the leaders of the biggest EU economies are a no-show,” Martinelli said.
‘We have Lula’
Unsurprisingly, US President Donald Trump, who pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement and has not sent officials to climate talks since his re-election in 2024, is not attending the summit.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who rarely attends COPs, will be represented by Vice President Han Zheng.
The United States and China are the world’s top economies and biggest emitters of planet-heating emissions, making their presence at climate talks crucial to the process.
“But we have Lula,” Cassel said.
Climate campaigners breathed a huge sigh of relief when Lula, who has championed cutting deforestation rates, defeated right-wing rival Flavio Bolsonaro in last month’s Brazilian presidential election.
COP31 host Turkey is championing a voluntary initiative to accelerate the electrification of transport, buildings and industry, with a target of raising electricity’s share of global energy consumption to 35 percent by 2035.
The EU has stressed that electrification must be “clean”, which could spark debate over the role of oil, gas and coal in the Turkish proposal.
Since agreeing in 2023 for the first time to transition away from fossil fuels -- the main driver of climate change -- nations have struggled to advance that goal at the annual COP conferences.