Key events

Good morning from the COP31 media centre here in Antalya after a sardine-style tram journey in to the venue.

We are now expecting the official ceremonial opening of the COP to start at 11am Turkey time (8am in the UK) – 30 minutes later than previously advertised.

That’s not a bad start, given some previous plenaries have been delayed by several hours.

Delegates arrive on the opening day of the COP31 climate conference. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

We’re expecting some stirring speeches from Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Australian climate change minister Chris Bowen, who is president of the negotiations.

We will also hear from Turkey’s environment minister, Murat Kurum, who is president of the COP. If you want to know who the key players are, my colleague Fiona Harvey explains here.

One of the most promising areas of potential progress is on electrification, which is needed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the strong growth in renewable energy around the world, nearly 80% of primary energy still comes from fossil fuels, used for transport, heating and industrial purposes.

Adopting electric vehicles, heat pumps, batteries and other low-carbon electric technologies could halve global primary energy needs, because they are so much more efficient than using fossil fuels.

Thornier issues of equity and climate justice will also come to the fore, including work on a “just transition” mechanism to help workers in high-carbon industries adjust to low-carbon jobs, and the vexed issue of climate finance for developing countries from the rich.

Poor countries are angry that many developed nations are slashing their aid budgets, including money for climate finance, and a promise to triple the funds available for helping them adapt to extreme weather has yet to be fleshed out.

Among the 70,000 registered attenders at today’s Cop will be civil society groups, Indigenous people from around the world, lawmakers from many countries, representatives of subnational governments, businesspeople and investors working on clean energy - and a number of fossil fuel lobbyists, whose repeated presence and influence at the annual “conference of the party” meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has sparked protest.

Though Turkey is hosting, Australia will preside over the formal agenda of negotiations, under a compromise agreed last year when both countries bid for the right to hold the meeting.

Welcome to Cop31 …

Hello, and welcome to the live blog for Cop31, this year’s UN climate summit. I’m Ajit Niranjan, the European environment correspondent – I’ll be running the liveblog from Berlin over the next two weeks while my colleagues in Antalya, Turkey, bring us updates from where the action is. We’re looking forward to guiding you through a hectic fortnight of planetary significance.

More than 90 heads of state and government, along with ministers and senior officials from close to 190 countries, are expected to descend on Turkey’s coastal city of Antalya this week, for the latest round of UN climate talks. Against a backdrop of rapidly rising temperatures and extreme weather, supercharged by fossil fuels, and fractious geopolitics, made worse by soaring inflation owing to the Iran war, the fortnight-long meeting will focus on “implementation” of the world’s targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and help those stricken by the climate crisis.