The world needs to focus on climate change

The opening of the COP31 Conference in Antalya could not come at a better moment. This is because it is so important that the international machinery dedicated to keeping to the globally agreed target of limiting greenhouse gas emissions must continue its work — and be seen to deliver, according to The Independent.

The 31st meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to give them their full titles, is the most important of the many such gatherings that have taken place precisely because the effects of climate change are impinging on our lives as never before, and because, despite the withdrawal of the United States and insufficient progress almost everywhere, the talking and action have to continue.

Without the COP process periodically making consciences twinge, humanity would be in an even worse position than it is today, and with less hope of survival. The diplomatic structures may often appear as merely performative, ineffective and irrelevant, but that is not the fault of those engaged in the tedious, tortured negotiations against the odds for reaching consensus. It is essential that the process of international cooperation continues in this sphere even as the great powers of today make proxy wars on each other. When, for example, the climate sceptics in the UK argue that the country’s contributions to global CO2 emissions are tiny compared to, say, China’s or India’s, and therefore the effort is futile, the COP process shows why they are wrong.

It is because these growing industrial powers have signed up to mandatory targets in the Paris treaty and are held to account via COP that makes it so crucial that Britain doesn’t casually slide away from its own obligations, solemnly undertaken. All the current arguments about the drilling for fossil fuels in the North Sea, the zero emission vehicle emissions mandate and joining the EU energy and emissions trading systems have to take place within that international context. The Net Zero by 2050 target has been set in domestic law since 2019.

That is why it is entirely appropriate that, as world leader in this field, the UK should send a full complement of representatives to COP31, including the prime minister, Andy Burnham, Miatta Fahnbulleh, energy security and net zero secretary, the foreign secretary Ed Miliband, who has retained his interest in the cause, the mayor of London Sadiq Khan, and climate minister Katie White. Other countries, such as France, Germany, Italy, India and China have sadly downgraded their presence, which is regrettable and myopic. But they remain signatories to climate agreements.

It highlights the change in the diplomatic climate since 175 sovereign states signed up to the Paris Treaty in 2015. Not the least of the many tragedies resulting from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East is that the world’s peoples and their leaders have had to attend to the immediate demands of military and economic security, and this has obviously been detrimental to the fight against climate change.

It is natural, and sadly inevitable that that should prove the case. There is no point denying it. However, as the freakish weather conditions across the world this year remind everyone, the transcendent issue remains the environment, and the very future of human life on Earth. In the northern hemisphere the feared collapse of the polar vortex appears to be the cause of an onset of exceptionally cold temperatures, exacerbated by an unusually strong El Niño effect. This follows successive years of record-breaking hot summers, and now an autumn drought. As Ms Fahnbulleh points out, “This summer, we all felt it. Record heatwaves. Homes lost to wildfires. Schools forced to close in the heat. Climate change is no longer a warning about the future, or something happening somewhere else. It is here, in Britain, now.”

She is right. The science has not disappeared just because the debates in reducing greenhouse emissions have slipped down the political agenda. Long after the wars of today are over, mankind as a whole will have to fight its existential war against climate change. That is why net zero matters, and why the COP process matters now more than ever.