The UN Secretary-General today asked the leaders present at COP31 in Turkey to “be up to the challenges” of the conference at a time when the intensification of the El Niño is colliding with the consequences of climate change.
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09/11/2026
by
Lusa
O secretary-General of the UN today asked the leaders present at COP31 in Turkey to “be up to the challenges” of the conference at a time when the intensification of the phenomenon El Niño is colliding with the consequences of climate change.
“ We have entered a new era of extreme weather. A phenomenon El Niño exceptional collides with a planet already overheated by man-made climate change. The weather records continue to be broken. The human cost continues to increase”, warned António Guterres, in a statement released before the UN climate conference in Antalia, Turkey.
Leaders in COP31 “need to be up to date, reducing emissions faster, accelerating a fair transition to abandon fossil fuels and providing vulnerable countries with the funding and protection they need,” he added.
The communiqué follows the latest climate status report prepared by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which shows that 2026 is part of a “long series of global records”, both in terms of temperatures and melting ice and rising sea level.
This year also marks the occurrence of an episode of El Niño “very intense, which should further accentuate the heat and intensify extreme weather conditions by 2027”, reports the organization.
The OMM points out that the last 12 years have been the hottest ever recorded, with the four most recent years occupying the top four positions.
According to the organization, sea level is at the highest level ever recorded and sea surface temperatures reached monthly records in 2026. As for freshwater reserves, they have been decreasing since 2014.
Between January and September 2026, the average temperature on the globe surface was about 1.47°C above the pre-industrial average — a level comparable to the 2025 (1.43°C) and 2023 (1.46°C), but below the 2024 (1.55°C record.
The United Nations agency admits that the temperature will probably rise by the end of the year due to the warming effect of El Niño, which has been intensifying since August and is expected to reach the strongest level ever recorded in December.
This conclusion is based on nine internationally recognised datasets, which have already made it possible to ascertain that the last four years – from 2023 to 2026 – were the hottest on record.