Departing UN chief Guterres calls climate fight a moment of truth

António Guterres used the phrase 'moment of truth' three times in twenty minutes during a farewell interview with the Associated Press, given from his 38th-floor conference room at UN headquarters. His second and final term as secretary-general expires at the end of the year, closing a decade in which he became one of the world's most visible advocates for cutting emissions.

His message to the leaders gathering for COP31, which opens on Monday in Turkey: 'We can no longer wait, we can no longer have endless discussions in which everybody tries to push the responsibility to someone else. Everybody must do more, everybody must do more now.' The conference is the thirty-first of its kind.

The decade produced a steady escalation of language. Three years ago Guterres declared that 'the era of global boiling has arrived' and toured Nepal's highest peaks warning of swollen glacier-fed lakes bursting into devastating floods. Last year, he recounted, scientists told him he could no longer say the 1.5-degree goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement was still alive — too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas had already been released. He called it 'one of the most difficult days of my life' and 'an enormous shock'. The UN's stated task has since shifted from holding the threshold to limiting how far past it the world goes.

His verdict on ten years of effort: 'It's not the world that's failed, it's the political leadership that's failed.' Guterres, an engineer before politics, argued that protecting the planet requires a long-term strategic view that most political systems lack, with policies changing too often to sustain determined investment; his proof that it can be done was his own term as Portugal's prime minister in the late 1990s. His grounds for hope are a worldwide boom in wind and solar power, now the cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels. Wars raging in Ukraine and Iran demonstrate, he argued, that relying on fossil fuels is a fundamental security problem — and he is now also trying to rally leaders around artificial intelligence, whose huge electricity and water consumption, he says, compounds everything else.

COP31 opens with the Taliban holding observer status — the regime's second UN summit since taking power in 2021, recognised by no member state, while girls' schools past the sixth grade stay shut.

The discussions in Antalya are scheduled to run until 20 November.