With Hopes Low and Temperatures High, Climate Summit Opens in Turkey

As heads of state and delegates from nearly every nation make their way on Monday to Antalya, Turkey, for the United Nations climate talks, one question hangs over the event: Will it matter? Soaring energy prices and artificial intelligence concerns have pushed climate change further into the background. The spirit of global cooperation that helped kick off landmark climate goals now seems of another era. The decision by President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement has created a leadership vacuum — and left nations fighting to a stalemate on issues where they’d once forged common ground.

Choi Hanchang, a lead negotiator from South Korea, said the main goals of this year’s conference were simply “survival and relevance.” “It’s not about the negotiations itself,” Mr. Choi said. “We have to make some middle ground for the survival of multilateralism.” More than a decade after the raucous celebration of the Paris accord, the international climate process is entering a lower-profile phase. The objectives of the conferences have narrowed.

This year’s talks, to be held for 12 days along the Mediterranean coast, will draw only a handful of leaders from industrialized nations. No groundbreaking decisions are expected. And yet, greenhouse gas emissions are at a record high. The planet is blowing past the limit that nations had set for global warming. Weeks of relentless heat this summer in Europe killed an estimated 50,000 people . A catastrophic glacier collapse in the Himalayas left thousands dead or missing and saddled Nepal with a $5 billion recovery bill.

A record-size El Niño is stoking wildfires in Indonesia, lashing California’s shore and further raising global temperatures. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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