Hosted by the UK under the presidency of former business secretary Alok Sharma and in partnership with Italy, the summit at the city’s SEC Centre will bring together the biggest gathering of world leaders ever assembled on British soil over the course of its 12-day run from Sunday 31 October to Friday 12 November. While the importance of the summit has been heavily hyped and expectation is high that a generation-defining agreement will be signed to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and put the brake on the pace of global heating in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris accord, there is currently a good deal of uncertainty surrounding precisely who will be attending.
Without the enthusiastic cooperation of the influential leaders of some of the planet’s biggest polluting nations, anything agreed at Cop26 will ring decidedly hollow.
