UN climate talks open in Turkey as record heat and floods mark 2026

Delegates from nearly 200 countries opened two weeks of UN climate talks in the Turkish resort city of Antalya on Monday, as scientists confirmed 2026 will rank among the four warmest years on record.

The 31st conference of the parties to the UN climate convention, known as Cop31, is being presided over by Australia and hosted by Turkey, an unusual dual arrangement reached as a compromise last year, as the Guardian reported. Turkey expects 100,000 visitors and at least 95 heads of state, with a leaders summit scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday.

The talks open with the World Meteorological Organization reporting that heat is accumulating in Earth’s systems at an accelerating rate, and with climate scientists confirming global heating will reach at least 1.8C, beyond the 1.5C limit countries promised to aim for in Paris in 2015.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, told the opening plenary that a global fossil fuel price crisis was “spreading inflation like a cancer” around the planet, as the Guardian reported. He said the “fossil fuel cost chaos” had delivered a “global shock wave, hitting households hard.”

The price spike followed President Donald Trump’s war with Iran and the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz oil supply route, which pushed petrol prices up 50% around the world.

Stiell said vulnerable communities were paying the price and that frustration at a lack of fairness was palpable. “The urgency of this moment must drive us forward,” he said. “Global heating is already costing the Earth.”

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said the world had “entered a new age of climate extremes,” according to the Guardian. He urged leaders to cut emissions faster, accelerate a transition from fossil fuels, and deliver the finance and protection vulnerable countries need.

The WMO, in its State of the Global Climate update released as the summit began, said the imbalance between incoming energy from the sun and energy leaving Earth had reached its highest level since monitoring began. The average surface temperature for January through September 2026 was about 1.47C above the preindustrial average.

Sea surface temperatures hit monthly records and sea level was the highest since records began, the agency said. The ocean absorbs 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and 2026 is on track to be the 10th successive year of record ocean heat.

When the UN climate convention was signed in 1992, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 356.42 parts per million. In 2025 it was 426.8 ppm, an increase of 53% since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The talks are opening as a historic El Niño builds in the tropical Pacific, and months after a glacier collapse set off catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet, killing at least 1,459 people with thousands more still missing.

This summer, more than 50,000 people died in Europe due to heatwaves, severe wildfire smoke shrouded parts of North America, and the El Niño weather event, described as “staggering” by scientists and still to reach its peak, continues to gather strength.

Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate change minister and president of the negotiations, said the 1.5C Paris target would be overshot but could be reclaimed. “We can return to it if we work together and act with urgency, solidarity and resolve,” he said.

Bowen said there was “enormous momentum” among countries for a new voluntary electrification goal, championed by Turkey and Australia, to raise the share of final energy consumption coming from electricity from one-fifth today to one-third within 10 years. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said countries were entering “the age of electricity.”

The countries pushing for the greatest action have stressed that the 1.5C limit cannot be abandoned. Jess Gasper, an environmental official for the Marshall Islands, said the limit was “in serious danger” but that overshoot “should never become an excuse for inaction.” She said it took eight years to get international finance to build a single sea wall to protect the Marshall Islands, a Pacific nation acutely threatened by sea level rise.

The United States is absent for the second year in a row, with the Trump administration refusing to send a delegation, as the Guardian reported. A White House official said the summit “rejects reality by failing to acknowledge that extremist climate policies are destroying countries around the world.”

Trump has derided the climate crisis as a “hoax” and triggered the withdrawal of the US from the international climate framework. While all other major economies reduced or slowed their carbon pollution last year, the US emitted an extra 133 million tons of planet-heating gases, according to a recent UN report.

About 20 Democratic members of Congress made the trip to Antalya, denied usual State Department assistance and forced to turn to philanthropic funding. Sean Casten, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, said: “I’m glad we found a way to get there, but it is insane.”

The Democrats’ win in the midterm elections last week, wresting control of both chambers of Congress from Trump’s Republicans, has buoyed delegates. Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said the results marked “the beginning of the end of the Trump era” and opened the door to America returning to the climate fight.

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said last week that while he still had faith in the negotiating process, the accelerating warming and approaching tipping points, allowed to happen within the Paris agreement framework, “cannot be considered as anything but a global failure.”

Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, said the latest research suggested the world would cross the 1.5C limit permanently in 2028, and with the planet heating at 0.4C a decade, would likely pass 2C in the late 2030s.

What I think

The numbers in the WMO report are the ones to watch while the talks run. Heat is accumulating faster than before. The ocean has set records for 10 straight years. The 1.5C limit will be crossed permanently within a few years, according to the scientists closest to the data, and 2C will likely follow in the late 2030s at the current rate.

Cop31 will produce a communiqué. It will include the voluntary electrification goal, some language on finance, and a restatement of the 1.5C aspiration. None of those words will lower the temperature. The only thing that lowers the temperature is less carbon in the atmosphere, and the countries best positioned to cut theirs are either absent, like the United States, or presiding over the talks while still approving coal mines, like Australia.

The dual hosting arrangement captures the problem. Australia is one of the world’s leading exporters of coal and liquefied natural gas, and is off track to meet its own emissions targets. More than 500 scientists in the country signed a letter saying Australia must stop approving fossil fuel projects if it wants to escape the charge of hypocrisy. The country brokering the global transition is not making the transition at home.

The US absence is the other half. The world’s largest historical emitter is not in the room, and the administration’s stated reason, that the summit “rejects reality,” is projection. The WMO report is reality. So are the 1,459 dead in Nepal and the 50,000 dead in Europe’s heatwaves. The Trump administration has left the table and increased emissions at the same time.

The Democrats heading to Antalya without State Department support are doing the work the executive branch will not do. Their midterm win matters because it gives other countries reason to believe the US will return. But a Democratic Congress cannot set climate policy while Trump holds the veto, and two years of lost time at the current rate of warming is not recoverable. Jess Gasper’s eight-year wait for a single sea wall is the real timeline of international climate finance. The Marshall Islands do not have another eight years.

The talks will end with a document. The planet will keep warming at the same rate. The gap between what is said in Antalya and what is done in the capitals that sent delegates there is the story, and it is the same story it has been for 31 conferences.