Greta Thunberg at COP31: 'The planet is not dying, it is being killed'

Greta Thunberg told the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye, on Thursday, 12 November that “the planet is not dying, it is being killed”, and that “we know by who”. It is the first UN climate conference the Swedish activist has attended in five years, and her name was among the top searches in the United States overnight.

What Greta Thunberg said

Speaking at a press conference alongside activists from Nepal, Canada and Australia, Thunberg said the planet is being killed by the very people expected to come to its rescue, The Guardian and AP reported. “No one is coming to our rescue,” she said.

She also warned that the world is heading towards “a future of more genocides and more ecocides”, in which basic rights are compromised and “basic necessities become luxuries”. She also tied the climate crisis to wars.

When she arrived on Tuesday, she had already called the annual summit hypocritical, saying it gives host countries a chance to “whitewash” themselves, AP reported.

The backdrop in Antalya

Her remarks landed as the Climate Action Tracker, a research group that rates countries’ climate plans, warned that collective climate action has stalled for a fifth year in a row.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has also called for windfall taxes on what he called “unjustifiable” energy profits, Bloomberg reported.

Why it matters for Pakistan

Pakistan is one of the countries Thunberg’s warning is about. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told COP31 this week that climate-vulnerable countries need grant-based finance and resilience funding rather than more loans, Dawn reported on Wednesday. After the 2022 floods, which affected about 33 million people, Pakistan’s case at every COP is that it pays for a crisis it did very little to cause.

Whether Antalya produces new money for countries like Pakistan will be decided in the final days of talks, not in speeches.