Marching in the Light: COP31 Update #6

Saturday at COP31 was dedicated to children, youth, education and skills, and the question of what today’s adults will hand on ran through the day. Thousands marched through the rain in central Antalya. Civil society leaders from Bangladesh laid out what their country needs from these talks. And a Buddhist side event asked participants to imagine a child, 20 years from now, asking what they did once they knew.

Marching in Antalya

Thousands of people marched through central Antalya in the rain for the People’s Climate March; organizers said more than 10,000 took part. Activists from five continents joined a global day of action “demanding climate justice, an end to fossil fuels and a just transition that puts people and the planet before corporate profit.” Members of the ecumenical delegation at COP31 joined them, chanting “We are marching in the light of God,” a line from the South African hymn “Siyahamba.”

The march opened the Peoples’ Climate Summit, a gathering of movements from Türkiye and around the world that runs through November 18. Its organizers plan to carry their demands into the final week of talks, from public climate finance that doesn’t add to poorer countries’ debt to a faster move away from fossil fuels. Back at the conference venue, ministers began arriving for that final week. UN climate chief Simon Stiell called progress so far “constructive.” Countries still have to decide whether a cover decision will be COP31’s main outcome. Some large developing countries have resisted it, and a first draft is expected early next week.

“The earth is very unhealthy”

At a COP31 press conference on Saturday, civil society speakers from Bangladesh described what climate change already means at home: “The earth is very unhealthy.” It came on the eve of the anniversary of Cyclone Sidr, which killed more than 3,400 people in Bangladesh in 2007.

They spoke of extreme heat, failing harvests and salty water, and the record bears them out. In April 2024, temperatures reached 43.8°C (110.8°F), and an agriculture official expected mango and lychee harvests to fall by about 30 percent. Studies in coastal Bangladesh link salty drinking water to a higher risk of pre-eclampsia in pregnancy.

Their first demand matches their government’s: climate finance as grants, not loans. They offered three tests for COP31: Are emissions falling fast enough? Are polluters doing their fair share? Can the least developed countries recover? UNEP finds that current pledges would cut global emissions by only 11 to 15 percent by 2035, against the 45 percent needed.

For more than 30 years, rising seas and shrinking land have been the lived reality of the people of Bangladesh. There is no day they can forget about climate change.

Meditation before negotiation

Few COP31 sessions have let faith communities show their own climate work. A side event hosted by Buddha’s Light International Association (BLIA), a global Buddhist lay organization, was an exception. It opened with meditation and an exercise: imagine a child, 20 years from now, asking when you knew what was happening to the earth, and what you did.

BLIA’s tree-planting project, T-Earth (for trees, tea and teamwork), has planted more than 95,000 trees since 2021, according to BLIA. Native tea trees grown inside the forest give the project an income that outlasts the planting ceremony. Most of the workers are over 65, speakers said, and most are Indigenous or from local communities. One man who had struggled for years joined his father on the project and became one of its leaders. For the first time in years, he told the team, he woke up with a sense of meaning.

Partners from Vikalp, an Indian nonprofit, described farming families led by women in southern Gujarat who save their own seed and plant fruit trees to fight malnutrition. Their message was clear: “Farmers protect nature. The value rarely reaches them.” The session closed in prayer.

The air of 2100

In the delegate pavilion at COP31, two small booths stand side by side. One recreates the air and temperatures of a century ago. The other carries visitors forward to 2100 “on the harshest road we could take,” the scenario in which emissions keep climbing for most of the century.

The difference between them is the point. After the air of 1926, the 2100 booth is hot and suffocating. A screen on the wall tells you to take a breath, then breathe out, while a timer counts down about six minutes in seven parts. Visitors get to walk out when the timer ends. By then, the projections on the screen have become something you can feel.

The screens walk through the numbers. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged 426 parts per million at Mauna Loa this September. On that harshest road it would reach about 1,135 ppm by 2100, nearly three times as much. Some regions are already drying, including the Mediterranean around Antalya, southern Africa and much of the Americas. There, the kind of drought that once came once a decade now comes about 1.7 times as often, and would come 2.4 times as often at 2°C of warming.

The harshest road is not the only one ahead. UNEP’s latest Emissions Gap Report finds that current policies point to about 2.8°C of warming this century. If countries deliver their climate plans in full, that drops to 2.6°C, still well above the Paris Agreement’s goals. While visitors wait their turn, a screen asks the question negotiators are working on this week: “Which air do we choose?”

Where the church comes in

“Which air do we choose?” echoes a much older question: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19, NRSV). A child baptized in a United Methodist church this year will be 74 in 2100, and the choices made here will shape the air that child breathes.

Follow our updates throughout COP31, share them with your congregation, and hold in prayer those working to turn commitments into action.