Key facts
- Hilda Heine said the response to overshoot must be overwhelming or the world we know is over.
- Mia Mottley said current policies put the world on a path to 2.8C of warming.
- António Guterres called for governments to tax oil and gas windfall profits and help vulnerable countries recover.
- Recep Tayyip Erdoğan celebrated two new oilfields with an estimated 135 million barrels of in-situ potential on Monday.
- Anthony Albanese was criticised for not mentioning fossil fuels in his Cop31 speech.
- The UN said 91 national leaders attended the summit; Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were absent.
Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine told the Cop31 leaders' summit in Turkey on November 11, 2026 that overshooting the 1.5C Paris temperature target would mean rising seas and floods destroying island towns, schools and hospitals. She described seeing coral on her home island bleached white within months. "Our response to the threat of overshoot must be overwhelming, or the world we know is over," she said.
Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley said governments had not tried hard enough since the Paris agreement. She said the UN projects 2.6C of warming even if every pledge is delivered, and 2.8C under current policies, calling overshoot "a debt, a debt of heat, borrowed against our children's future."
UN secretary general António Guterres said oil and gas companies had distorted science and delayed climate action, and called for a windfall tax on profits he said they made from the Iran war. "Fossil fuels must go the way of the dinosaurs," he said, adding that the dinosaurs did not have a lobby. The speech was among his last before he stands down next month.
Turkey and Australia are co-hosting Cop31. Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he wants the summit remembered as a turning point and called on countries to act rather than make promises. On Monday he celebrated the discovery of two new oilfields with an estimated in-situ potential of 135 million barrels. Heine said new fossil fuel discoveries were "not something to celebrate but something to fear."
Australia's prime minister Anthony Albanese called the conference a historic moment for Australia, one of the world's biggest coal and liquefied gas exporters, and was criticised for not mentioning fossil fuels in his speech. The UN said 91 national leaders attended; Donald Trump of the US and Xi Jinping of China were absent, and the French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz were instead heading to an AI conference in Ireland.