PM Shehbaz leaves for Turkiye to attend COP31 summit

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif left for Antalya, Turkiye, on Tuesday to attend the COP31 World Leaders’ Summit, where he will call for concrete global action against climate change and demand predictable, adequate and accessible climate financing for developing countries.

During his November 10-12 visit, the prime minister will address the World Leaders’ Summit on Wednesday, November 11, highlighting Pakistan’s efforts to accelerate solarisation, expand renewable energy capacity and transition towards cleaner and more sustainable energy sources.

According to a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Shehbaz will also emphasise the need to strengthen the capacity of developing countries to cope with the effects of climate change and achieve sustainable development goals.

He will urge the international community to take practical and effective measures to address the growing threats posed by climate change.

The prime minister is accompanied by Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Senator Sherry Rehman, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar and his adviser Tariq Fatemi.

During the visit, Shehbaz is also expected to hold bilateral meetings with the Turkish leadership and other world leaders to discuss bilateral relations, regional and international developments and cooperation in various fields.

He will also attend a high-level roundtable convened by the COP31 presidency on the sidelines of the summit.

The PMO said Pakistan’s participation in the World Leaders’ Summit reflected its strong support for the global climate agenda and provided an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to working with the international community to address the climate crisis.

Pakistan heads to COP31 with ambitious climate targets and a much larger climate-policy toolkit than it had four years ago. The difficult part now is turning those plans into finance, bankable projects and action on the ground.

The 2022 floods affected around 33 million people and caused an estimated $14.9 billion in physical damage and $15.2 billion in economic losses, according to a post-disaster assessment by the government and international development partners.

The disaster struck as Pakistan was chairing the Group of 77 and China, giving Islamabad a prominent role in climate negotiations ahead of COP27.

In September 2022, then-foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, speaking as G77 and China chair, called for loss-and-damage finance to be placed formally on the COP27 agenda. Pakistan also argued that climate disasters should not simply force vulnerable countries into greater debt.

COP31 amid worsening climate crisis

The prime minister’s visit comes as world leaders gather in Antalya for the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), being held from November 9 to 20.

The World Leaders’ Summit will take place on November 11 and 12, bringing together heads of state and government to discuss accelerating climate action and implementing international commitments.

The conference opened on Monday amid growing concerns over rising global temperatures, increasingly severe climate-related disasters and the widening gap between climate commitments and their implementation.

At the opening of the two-week conference, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell warned that progress in tackling global warming remained far too slow.

A United Nations Environment Programme report published in October warned that the world was on course to exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold set under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

This year is also expected to rank among the four hottest on record, according to a UN report, with extreme heatwaves and other climate-related disasters highlighting the urgency of international action.

Turkiye’s COP31 presidency has also placed the clean energy transition high on the agenda, seeking commitments to electrify more than a third of the global economy by 2035, compared with around one-fifth currently.

The summit is expected to focus on turning climate commitments into concrete action, expanding clean energy and improving access to financing for countries most vulnerable to climate change.