Prime Minister Browne joins Caribbean and international leaders at COP31 World Leaders Summit

Antigua and Barbuda’s Head of Government, Prime Minister the Honourable Gaston Browne, has formally arrived at the Antalya, Türkiye, COP31 conference complex to take part in the high-stakes World Leaders Summit, standing alongside dozens of global heads of state, senior government officials, and climate policy stakeholders to deliberate on actionable solutions for the escalating planetary climate emergency.
Prime Minister Browne’s official delegation includes two senior national representatives: His Excellency Theon Ali, Antigua and Barbuda’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador to the State of Qatar, and Her Excellency Ruleta Camacho Thomas, the country’s designated Climate Ambassador and Director of the Department of Environment.
Shortly after checking in at the summit venue, Prime Minister Browne held a series of targeted bilateral and regional engagements, first convening with fellow Caribbean heads of government in attendance at the global climate gathering. These regional counterparts included Saint Lucia’s Prime Minister the Honourable Philip J. Pierre, Barbados’ Prime Minister the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, The Bahamas’ Prime Minister the Honourable Philip E. Davis, and St. Kitts and Nevis’ Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Geoffrey Hanley. The closed-door regional huddles laid groundwork for coordinated Caribbean negotiating positions to amplify the collective voice of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) across the summit’s formal proceedings.
Beyond regional peer consultations, Prime Minister Browne also held productive side meetings with two high-profile international figures: Ambassador Z. Levent Gümrükçü, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Türkiye, the host nation for COP31, and John Kerry, former United States Secretary of State and the Biden administration’s ex-Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. These cross-national exchanges created space for targeted dialogue on bridging gaps between major greenhouse gas emitting nations and climate-vulnerable small island territories.
Running across November 11 and 12, the COP31 World Leaders Summit serves as the flagship high-level segment of the two-week global climate conference, designed to align national top leadership around shared global climate priorities, dismantle longstanding barriers to cross-border cooperation, and unlock tangible, time-bound progress on pledged climate action that has largely fallen behind the targets laid out in the Paris Agreement. For Antigua and Barbuda and the entire Caribbean regional bloc, this summit represents a rare, high-visibility platform to escalate long-unaddressed SIDS priorities: unobstructed access to low-cost, no-strings-attached climate adaptation financing, scaled international investment in critical infrastructure to build national and regional climate resilience, and enforceable global frameworks to mitigate the cascading, disproportionate climate impacts that small island nations bear despite contributing less than 1% of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions. Prime Minister Browne’s formal attendance and diplomatic engagements at COP31 underscore Antigua and Barbuda’s long-running, unwavering advocacy for equitable global climate partnerships, and a unified global response that explicitly centres the unique, existential vulnerabilities faced by small island developing nations.