Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva urged fellow world leaders to move more aggressively to combat climate change, warning countries have become complacent on global warming as other risks escalate.

“We started talking more about weapons and tariffs than the survival of future generations,” Lula, as he’s universally known, said Wednesday at the United Nations-convened COP31 climate negotiations in Antalya, Turkey. “With the wars and inflation knocking on our doors today, it is more difficult for us to deal with this climate catastrophe of tomorrow.”

Lula addressed dozens of other leaders at the conference, fresh from his reelection to a fourth term, a come-from-behind victory against climate sceptic Flávio Bolsonaro. That, along with Democratic gains in the US midterm elections, has injected fresh optimism into the two weeks of talks that began November 9.

His call for renewed momentum, coming more than a decade after the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement, follows a bleak United Nations assessment that the world can no longer achieve the accord’s key commitment to prevent global warming exceeding 1.5C.

“The truth is that we have the power to determine how high, how long and how devastating that overshoot will be,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the meeting, making a similar appeal for accelerated action. “We have the power to make sure the overshoot is a temporary breach.”

The tens of thousands of diplomats, delegates and activists gathered in Antalya for the COP31 talks are confronting a major challenge: The world’s work to fund and combat global warming has waned even as its impacts are accelerating.

The consequences of planetary warming have been highlighted this year by tens of thousands of deaths tied to lethal heat waves and wildfires across Europe as well as a devastating glacier collapse in Nepal.

“Either we look at the difficulties and we complain, or we embrace hope and take action,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the meeting. “With every minute that we fail to achieve the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, the risks and costs we face continue to grow.”

Dignitaries attending through Thursday also include UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb. However, the US has no official representation for a second year, and top leaders from several major economies including China, India, Germany, and Canada were also absent.

“Unfortunately, our fight against climate change is taking place at a time when the international system is struggling with even more daunting challenges,” Erdogan said. “Wars, crises, migration, hunger and poverty are making the need for international solidarity greater by the day.”

Antonio Guterres speaks at the opening of the COP31 leaders summit in Antalya, Turkey, on Nov. 11.

Lula called on Turkey and Australia — the countries sharing the negotiating and hosting responsibilities of COP31 — to prioritise climate finance, the transition away from fossil fuels and deforestation targets discussed at last year’s summit, hosted in Belem, Brazil.

The country has presented global “road maps” to transition away from fossil fuels, increase finance for developing countries to $1.3 trillion by 2035 and reverse deforestation by the end of the decade.

Still, any effort to bolster the shift away from oil, gas and coal is likely to face stiff resistance from a number of petrostates, including Saudi Arabia.

Guterres, speaking at the final climate summit before his term ends next month, urged nations to do more to hold oil and gas producers accountable for their climate impact. Nine large oil and gas companies had collective profits of about $95 billion in the last quarter, dwarfing the amount available to help the developing world to adapt to climate change, he said.

The UN’s loss and damage fund, which allocates money to developing nations hit by climate disasters, has received about $600 million, equivalent to what fossil fuel companies made in about 14 hours, he said.

“It’s time for governments to tax these windfall profits and use the to help vulnerable countries recover,” Guterres said, to mild applause in the summit hall. “Polluters must pay.”

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