It's time for more than 130 world leaders to feel the heat. They will traipse to the podium Monday and Tuesday at crucial international climate talks in Scotland and talk about what their country is going to do about the threat of global warming. From U.S. President Joe Biden to Seychelles President Wavel John Charles Ramkalawan, they are expected to say how their nation will do its utmost, challenge colleagues to do more and generally turn up the rhetoric.
“Humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was expected to say during Monday's opening session, according to partial remarks released by his office late Sunday. “It's one minute to midnight and we need to act now.”
The biggest names, including Biden, Johnson, India's Narendra Modi, France's Emmanuel Macron and Ibrahim Solih, president of hard hit Maldives, will take the stage Monday.
And then the leaders will leave. The idea is that they will do the big political give-and-take, setting out broad outlines of agreement, and then have other government officials hammer out the nagging but crucial details. That's what worked to make the historic 2015 Paris climate deal a success, former U.N. Climate Secretary Christiana Figueres told The Associated Press.
“For heads of state, it is actually a much better use of their strategic thinking,” Figueres said.
In Paris, the two signature goals — trying to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times and net zero carbon emissions by 2050 — were created by this leaders-first process, Figueres said. In the unsuccessful 2009 Copenhagen meeting the leaders swooped in at the end.
Thousands lined up in a chilly wind in the Scottish city of Glasgow on Monday to get through a bottleneck at the entrance to the venue. But what will be noticeable are a handful of major absences at the summit known as COP26.
Xi Jinping, president of top carbon-polluting nation China, won't be in Glasgow. Figueres said his absence isn't that big a deal because he isn't leaving the country during the pandemic and his climate envoy is a veteran negotiator. Biden, however, has chided China and Russia for their less than ambitious efforts to curb emissions and blamed them for a disappointing statement on climate change from the Group of 20 summit of the world's largest economies in Rome this weekend.
Perhaps more troublesome for the U.N. Summit is the absence of several small nations from the Pacific islands that couldn't make it because of COVID-19 restrictions and logistics. That's a big problem because their voices relay urgency, Figueres said.