Cop28: US and Chinese leaders’ absence threatens to undermine Dubai climate change summit

Xi Jinping and Joe Biden are both skipping the event, which may indicate that they do not expect any breakthroughs

However, some observers said the world’s two biggest polluters could still show they are committed to tackling the problem

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Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden will not be joining other world leaders at the climate summit. Photo: dpa

Published: 10:23pm, 1 Dec 2023Updated: 12:42pm, 23 Feb 2024

The absence of Xi Jinping and Joe Biden from the largest ever climate summit may be a sign that neither the Chinese nor American President has high expectations from the event, analysts have said.

World leaders and more than 70,000 delegates have travelled to Dubai for the two-week United Nations climate change summit, known as Cop28, but the leaders of the world’s two largest polluters are staying away.

“High-level leaders generally try to avoid meetings if they don’t anticipate the meeting itself being successful, as they don’t want to be associated with that kind of disappointment directly,” Josef Gregory Mahoney, a politics professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai, said.

He also said there were domestic political considerations in play for both men. Neither will be able to announce a climate breakthrough, and Biden cannot show that the US is living up to its commitments while Xi has to factor in the cost of meeting climate targets at a time when the Chinese economy is struggling.

Ma Jun, a leading Chinese environmentalist and the founding director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said the conference could set out actions and policies to tackle climate change, and both China and the United States showed they were determined to tackle the problem at climate change talks in California last month.

Last month, the two countries relaunched their climate working group. They also agreed to include methane in their respective 2035 emission-cutting plans — the first time China has made such a pledge.