UN chief urges a climate justice compact as leaders gather for the COP31 summit at Antalya

11 November 2026

World leaders gathered at Antalya in Turkiye for the two-day high-level Summit of the COP31 climate conference, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used it to press for a climate justice compact. He warned the Leaders' Summit that the world is on course for more than 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, far past the limit the Paris Agreement set. Breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, he said, is now the danger governments have to reckon with. To show how lopsided the money is, he set two numbers side by side. The nine largest oil companies in the world earned 95 billion dollars in a single quarter. Against that, the international fund set up to answer loss and damage has received roughly 600 million dollars. A compact on climate justice, he argued, is the way to close that gap between who profits and who pays.