Key events

The lights go dark in the plenary room and we get a short movie, designed to awaken the emotions and inspire the negotiators with scenes of fire and storms.

“When did you start to look at nature as if it’s not your nature,” the gravel-voiced narrator asks.

“It’s time to reconnect with the planet we have grown apart from,” the text on the screen says.

Stirring stuff.

Veteran Brazilian diplomat André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, the president of last year’s Cop30 in Belem, is getting the opening ceremony under way.

Andre Aranha Correa do Lago, president of last year’s climate summit, at the opening ceremony of Cop31. Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

“We know the wealthiest people are those increasing their emissions, but we have to bring people out of poverty,” he says.

We are waiting for the ceremony to start and I have a seat at the back. Cop31 has a theme tune and I’m going to call it – it’s a banger.

“Bring down the heat, make it drop.”

“One world, one call. Let’s Cop.”

It’s on Spotify and no doubt other music streaming services.

Leaders of many big polluters are expected to skip the summit

In the plenary session that has just begun, Turkey’s environment minister, Murat Kurum, and Australia’s climate and environment minister, Chris Bowen, will kick off the conference, along with the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell.

Their task will be to show that the 2015 Paris climate agreement is still working, despite record-breaking temperatures in the past two years that have surpassed the pact’s key threshold of 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels – though the goal will only be missed if the decadal average ends up hotter than that – and despite uncertainty over future climate finance to the developing world.

Most world leaders will not arrive until Wednesday and Thursday, when the “leaders’ summit” segment takes place, and they will hold multilateral and bilateral talks aimed at breaking the impasse over how to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.

Some big names will be missing: Xi Jinping, China’s president, rarely attends summits; Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, also tends to skip Cops; and Donald Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris agreement and is in the process of withdrawal from its parent treaty, the 1992 UNFCCC. This year, some European leaders will also join the absentee list: Emmanuel Macron of France, who has been a major presence at previous Cops, will not attend, nor Friedrich Merz of Germany or Mark Carney of Canada, despite claims to be climate leaders.

Brazil’s recently re-elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will attend, following Brazil’s hosting of the Cop30 summit in Belem last year, and is expected to highlight issues of climate inequalities between the rich and the poor – including the rich elites within developed and developing countries, whose high-carbon lifestyles are at odds with those of their less well-off citizens.

The EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will join, and the UK’s Andy Burnham will also take part, with foreign minister, Ed Miliband, who has been briefing other countries on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse around the world.

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.

Cop31, this year's UN climate summit, kicks off in Turkey

Hello, and welcome to the live blog for Cop, the annual UN summit to stop climate breakdown. 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.