Marshall Islands president to Cop31: 'The world we know is over'

Heine, one of a handful of Pacific Island leaders to address the leaders' summit in Turkey on Wednesday, said overshooting the 1.5C Paris temperature target would mean waves eating away shorelines and floods destroying towns, schools and hospitals. She described seeing bright, lush coral beneath the water of her home island in July, bleached white just months later. Every new oil well drilled and every lump of coal extracted threatens her country's future, she said, adding that fresh fossil fuel discoveries are not something to celebrate but something to fear.

Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley took aim at governments that had not tried hard enough to cut emissions since Paris. She said the UN projects 2.6C even if every pledge is delivered, and 2.8C on current policies. Mottley called overshoot a debt of heat borrowed against children's futures, and said it must be repaid.

António Guterres, delivering one of his last speeches as UN secretary general before he stands down next month, blamed a deceitful fossil fuel industry and countries that keep expanding production while claiming commitment to 1.5C. He said oil and gas companies distorted science and delayed action, and called for a windfall tax on their bumper profits from the Iran war, with the money used to help vulnerable countries recover. Fossil fuels, he said, must go the way of the dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs did not have a lobby.

Turkey is co-hosting the summit with Australia, and presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Anthony Albanese both praised the arrangement. Erdoğan said he wants Cop31 remembered as a turning point and urged countries to act rather than promise, warning that risks and costs grow with every minute the Paris targets go unmet. Two days earlier, away from the conference hall, he celebrated the discovery of two new oilfields with an estimated in-situ potential of 135m barrels. Albanese called the conference a historic moment for Australia, one of the world's biggest coal and liquified gas exporters, and was criticised for not mentioning fossil fuels in his speech.

The leaders' gathering was relatively threadbare: 91 national leaders attended, according to the UN, with Donald Trump of the US and Xi Jinping of China absent. French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz skipped it and are heading to Ireland for a conference on AI instead.

Climate scientist Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, described a feeling of panic and a mood gradually darkening among scientists, saying people talk about things having gone backwards. The UN Environment Programme has found that overshoot is now inevitable, and warned its effects on icy regions will be so calamitous that it should be kept as brief and low as possible. North Macedonia's president Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova said this is the first generation to fully understand the consequences of its choices and perhaps the last with time to change course, while Slovenia's president Nataša Pirc Musar asked what is left to unite nations if human dignity and respect for nature are not at the heart of decisions.