COP31 Opens in Antalya With a Co-Presidency, Health Agenda and El Niño Warnings

The UN climate conference COP31 opened on Monday in Antalya, on Türkiye's Mediterranean coast, with nearly 200 countries represented and more than 90,000 participants expected before the talks close on Friday, 20 November, according to UN News. UN News frames the summit as one built less around a single landmark agreement than around converting existing commitments into practical decisions, and reports that UN agencies used the opening day to issue warnings about the potential impacts of El Niño.

A co-presidency and an early push for a political text

Türkiye's Environment Minister Murat Kurum formally took the gavel as COP31 President on Monday morning, UN News reports, while Australia's Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will oversee negotiations under a co-presidency arrangement agreed during COP30.

"Our decisions must take shape in a city's infrastructure, on a farmer's land and along a factory's production line. Families must feel their impact in lower energy bills," Mr. Kurum told delegates, in remarks reported by UN News.

Mr. Bowen said he intends to develop a presidency-led decision across the course of the conference rather than leaving it to the closing days. "We know there will be a difference of views – on the value of the decision, on its elements, on how far we go. But our job is to work to close those differences and provide the most ambitious, most outcome-orientated decision that consensus will allow," he said, according to UN News.

UN Climate Change chief Simon Stiell told the opening plenary that "progress is nowhere near far enough or fair enough," urging governments to move past target-setting and "supercharge solutions." He added: "No COP is a silver bullet. No single conference can bridge the chasm between the science and reality."

UN News reports that finance is expected to be among the hardest issues, with developing countries pressing for faster access to funding for adaptation and cleaner development, alongside negotiations on emissions reductions and a just transition.

Health, heat and seasonal forecasts

Monday was also Food, Agriculture and Health Day. The World Health Organization estimates that between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, UN News reports, with extreme heat, floods and shifting weather patterns already straining health systems.

Speaking at a press conference held by the World Meteorological Organization, Alan Dangour of the Wellcome Trust Foundation urged negotiators to place people at the centre of their decisions: "The main character at the center of this story is not the atmosphere. It's not the land, the ocean or the ice. It's us. You and me, our family and our communities." He added: "We cannot adapt to an unmitigated future."

Joy Shumake-Guillemot of the WMO described to UN News how a joint initiative with WHO is feeding climate information into public health planning — a forecast of dangerously high temperatures can help hospitals prepare for more patients, while rainfall and seasonal predictions can help authorities anticipate outbreaks of diseases such as malaria. "The weather information is very practical, it is directly relevant to the decisions being made in the health sector, but they often don't have access to it," she said, adding that "from a public health perspective, almost all heat deaths are actually preventable."

Health is one of the 10 priority areas of COP31's Action Agenda, UN News reports. Countries are being urged to implement the Belém Health Action Plan agreed at COP30, and a new Antalya Initiative for Health Resilience is being launched. Seasonal prediction of this kind is a recurring theme in ENSO-related impacts work.

Farming, drought and an unquantified El Niño signal

Food and agriculture account for roughly one third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to UN News, while remaining highly exposed to drought, flooding and rising temperatures. Delegates at COP31 are reviewing the Sharm el-Sheikh programme on agriculture and food security agreed at COP27 and deciding what follows it.

Cristian Barrasueta of the World Rural Forum told UN News that family farmers need a voice in climate policy and simpler routes to finance, describing complicated procedures and multiple intermediaries as barriers for small farming organizations. He pointed to Fiji, where families are trialling different crop varieties and protecting seedlings from increasingly powerful cyclones.

UN News reports that a severe drought in Bolivia has prompted a national emergency declaration, and cites official figures — the report does not name the Bolivian body that issued them — putting livestock losses at more than 75,000 head, with over 114,000 families affected. Against a backdrop of El Niño that UN News describes as expected to intensify in the coming months, Mr. Barrasueta argued that farmers need support now rather than after years of planning and paperwork.

For readers tracking the event itself, it is worth noting that this UN News report quantifies neither the El Niño it references nor its outlook: it gives no Niño 3.4, ONI or other index value, no strength classification and no dated forecast period. Numerical ENSO diagnostics appear in the monitoring products of national and international meteorological agencies rather than in this conference coverage.