Washington stays home

The United States is not sending a delegation to the Cop31 climate summit for the second year in a row, even as scores of world leaders and representatives of close to 190 countries gather in Antalya.

A White House spokesperson said the Trump administration wants no part of "extremist climate policies".

Donald Trump himself put the stance more bluntly. Speaking at a rally in Georgia about oil and gas profits drawn from the Iran war, he said: "I don't give a damn ... we're making a frickin' fortune."

Democrats in Antalya

The US absence is not total. Twenty Democratic members of Congress have travelled to Antalya, buoyed by their party's stunning success in the US midterms last week. That result will enable them to stymie Trump's moves to dismantle pollution rules and cut clean energy support.

Host and negotiators set the bar

Turkey, the host country, says Cop31 must produce "a tangible outcome ... that people can see is real".

Australia's Chris Bowen, the climate and energy minister who presides over the formal negotiations as Cop31 president, has called for measurable movement. "We need progress, it needs to be a step forward on previous Cops," he said.

Bowen also highlighted one figure on climate finance:

• •Only 0.2% of the world's available climate finance goes to small island developing states for adaptation.

A gathering shadowed by impacts

Recorded temperatures this year went beyond the limit of 1.5C above preindustrial levels that the 2015 Paris agreement aimed for. The strongest El Niño weather system on record, supercharged by fossil fuels, is set to take hundreds of thousands of lives and cause damage costing trillions of dollars. Scientists describe the event, still short of its peak, as "staggering".

The human toll this summer has already been counted. In Europe, more than 50,000 people died due to heatwaves, while in Nepal a glacier collapse triggered a landslide causing more than 1,500 deaths.

Voices from the most exposed countries have been blunt. Rukiya Khamis, east Africa programme manager at 350.org, said: "It is fundamentally unjust that those least responsible are being left to carry the greatest costs."

Adão Soares Barbosa, chair of the Least Developed Countries group of 44 nations, called climate finance, adaptation and limiting overshoot not political choices but matters of survival. The Paris agreement's credibility, he argued, will be measured not by promises made, but by commitments fulfilled.

The talks have an unusual shape: they take place in Antalya, but the formal negotiations will be presided over by Australia, the product of a compromise over competing bids last year.