Cop31: ‘The crisis is upon us now’ Burnham due to tell climate summit

World leaders will hold sway over Cop again today, as they swing through a series of bilateral meetings and roundtables on subjects from methane to forest finance. Prime minister Andy Burnham of the UK has arrived, and is set to follow up Ed Miliband’s warnings on the climate threat to national security with the appointment of a first climate security adviser. He will grab a bilateral with President Lula of Brazil while in town, before departing – with most other European leaders – to the Dublin conference on AI.

But while the leaders carry on their photo opportunities, and their entourages clog up the central halls with thickets of security guards, in the background negotiators are quietly working their way through the reams of text that are the main output of the annual “conference of the parties”.

The agenda for Cop31 was agreed without much delay on Monday, but one item on which there was no agreement was the status of any “cover decision” from this year’s meeting.

Most Cops produce a cover decision, which is a handy way of gathering together some of the disparate threads of discussion that take place across these halls. Few Cop presidents try to get by without one – at Cop29, in Azerbaijan in 2024, the presidential decision to do without angered many parties.

The cover decision has formal status within Cops – it is negotiated, and gavelled through at the end, so the resolutions it contains are binding and countries can be held to them later. But unlike the other formal negotiating streams, which focus clearly on a single topic, the cover decision is a mixed bag, containing a variety of elements that can range from the decorative, such as thanks to parties and organisations the negotiators wish to acknowledge, or nods to issues such as gender equality and inclusion, and recognition of important issues that do not have a home elsewhere in the negotiations, such as the health impacts of the climate crisis, or concerns about the state of the oceans.

But the cover decision can also be where key elements of progress are made. It was a cover decision at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021 that yielded the resolution to “phase down” coal; and one at Cop28 in Dubai in 2023 where the key pledge to “transition away from fossil fuels” was nestled among reams of other text.

This year, Australia has left open the option of having a cover decision, but some key groups appear opposed, including the Arab Group, Russia and the Like-Minded Developing Countries, a grouping usually heavily influenced by Saudi Arabia, with India and sometimes China as members.

The items that could be in a cover decision this year include the pledge to derive 35% of final energy from electricity by 2035; recognition of the Brazilian roadmap to “transition away from fossil fuels”; the overshoot of the 1.5C temperature rise limit; the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and adaptation finance for poor countries.

Welcome back to the Cop31 liveblog, I’m Ajit Niranjan and I’ll be taking you through our fourth day of the climate change summit in Turkey.

British prime minister Andy Burnham is due to address the summit this morning. Overnight the UK government announced that it would be appointing the world’s first special representative for climate security, a new role designed to advise the government on national security risks from the climate crisis.

Burnham will tell the key climate talks: “We should all recognise the summer was not normal. The climate crisis is upon all of us now. We saw that with the wildfires that devastated lives and livelihoods everywhere.”

“The message I carry here, in my first Cop as prime minister, is that the UK remains determined to reach net zero by 2050 and to work with our partners to build a clean energy future. The world has changed. The consensus we once enjoyed on science and climate action has broken down. “We will not stand by, and that’s why I’ve pledged a new era of British leadership over the next decade.”

We’ll be following his speech, those of the other leaders (the ones that have showed up, at least, Germany and France are among the many no-shows this year), and everything else happening at the talks today.