Greta Thunberg Arrives at UN Climate Talks With Stark Warning

ANTALYA – Climate activist Greta Thunberg arrived Tuesday at the United Nations climate summit, calling on world leaders to put the well-being of people and the planet ahead of profits and political influence.

The gathering, known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP31, follows a year marked by devastating heat waves and other climate-related disasters around the world.

Speaking as she entered the summit venue in Antalya, Turkey, Thunberg warned that the climate crisis is “threatening everything,” adding that “everything and everyone we love is at stake.”

“We should act to protect people and improve their lives, rather than continually sacrificing the global majority and the planet we all depend on so that a privileged few can continue accumulating unimaginable profits and holding geopolitical power,” she told reporters.

This is Thunberg’s first U.N. climate summit appearance since COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021. At that meeting, she famously characterized the pledges and commitments from world leaders as “blah, blah, blah.”

In 2024, she joined a protest in Georgia opposing Azerbaijan’s hosting of that year’s climate summit. Thunberg accused Azerbaijan of using the event to “greenwash their crimes and human rights abuses.”

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Thunberg is expected to take part in this year’s discussions for several days. She said the climate crisis cannot be solved without sweeping structural reforms, arguing that existing political and economic systems “have become incompatible with human nature.”

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Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India.

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