ANTALYA, Nov 12 — Leaders at the COP31 summit in Turkey are trying out a new sales pitch for climate action that is tailored to the times: do it to bolster the economy and bring down the cost of living.
The message, being repeated in the hallways and on the plenary stage of the annual United Nations climate change conference, reflects efforts by organisers to capture the attention of governments wrestling with crises that have pushed global warming down the list of priorities.
Among those is rampant inflation driven in part by disruptions to West Asian crude oil shipments since the onset of the Iran war. Consumer price pressures from fuel to food were a major driver in the United States midterm elections that handed control of Congress to Democrats, and are an important vulnerability for leaders across Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
“Three-quarters of humanity live in countries that import fossil fuels, hostage to price shocks they did not create and cannot control,” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres told world leaders attending the summit yesterday.
“Recent conflicts make clear that this is a recipe for chronic insecurity and a cost-of-living meltdown,” he added, saying the clear solution is a shift to renewable energy.
Simon Stiell, head of the UN climate office, made the same point. “Today, chaos in global energy markets and climate disasters are supercharging inflation, slamming government budgets, pushing household bills up and living standards down,” he told the conference.
“The political costs of fossil fuel dependency are unforgiving. Climate action can help relieve the pressures.”
John Kerry, a former US secretary of state who has been advocating for climate action for decades, said he likes the reframing of the issue.
Climate change has become a massively divisive political issue in recent years, including in the US, where President Donald Trump last year withdrew the world’s top historical greenhouse gas emitter from international climate cooperation after calling warming a hoax.
“I think everybody who is working on climate needs to change the way they talk about it,” Kerry told reporters on the sidelines of the summit. “I think that grouping of security, health, jobs, stability of communities and food supply are all very real and very much on people's minds when I talk to them.”
To be sure, speakers at COP31 tended to agree the primary motivation for climate action should centre on the overwhelming scientific evidence that warming is human driven and dangerous.
“It is our responsibility to turn scientific evidence into political action and ensure that our decisions are guided by fact, not short-term political interests,” Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar said in a speech to the summit yesterday.
But European energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen said emphasising other benefits of cutting emissions could help build a consensus for action that could include climate sceptics.
“Because even if you don’t believe in climate change, which I obviously do, we should be able to agree that moving away from a dependency on fossils is extremely smart for security reasons,” he said.
