Prominent climate change activist Greta Thunberg arrived Tuesday at the U.N. climate meeting, where she emphasized the need to protect people and the planet over profits and power.
This year's meeting — called the Conference of the Parties, or COP31 — comes after a year of climate-induced heat waves and other disasters.
As she arrived at the meeting venue in Antalya, Turkey, Thunberg said climate change is “threatening everything" and that “everything and everyone we love is at stake.”
“We should act to protect and benefit people rather than constantly sacrificing the global majority and the very planet we are all living on, for a fortunate few to keep making unimaginable profits and maintaining geopolitical power,” she told reporters.
Thunberg is attending her first U.N. climate summit since she participated in the 2021 COP in Glasgow, Scotland, where she dismissed promises made by global leaders as “blah, blah, blah."
In 2024, Thunberg participated in a protest rally in Georgia against Azerbaijan hosting that year's climate talks. Thunberg accused Azerbaijan of using that summit to "greenwash their crimes and human rights abuses.”
Thunberg is expected to join this year's talks for a few days. She said structural changes are needed across the world to deal with the climate crisis because current political and economic systems “have become incompatible with human nature.”
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Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India.
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