How the US selected the 40 world leaders invited to Biden climate summit
SINGAPORE – Getting the world’s top emitters to set bolder climate targets had been a key consideration for the United States in deciding on the list of nations invited to take part in last month’s leaders summit on climate, a US official said last week .
Getting a diversity of voices to the table – including nations bearing the brunt of climate change impacts, and those with solutions that others could learn from – were also considered, said Dr Jonathan Pershing, senior adviser to US climate envoy John Kerry.
Forty world leaders – including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong – had been invited to take part in the two-day virtual event convened by US President Joe Biden to galvanise global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Dr Pershing said the US had wanted to bring nations in the Major Economies Forum – an informal group comprising the world’s largest economies including China, India, Australia and Brazil – to the table.
“That group is collectively responsible for (around) 70 per cent of global emissions. So if you have them and they’re working jointly and with a concerted focus, you really get a substantial share of the total emissions in the world,” he said during a press conference organised by the State Department for foreign journalists last Tuesday.
Dr Pershing noted that large economies will also experience the impacts of climate change.
“But they don’t speak with the same kind of existential threat in their future that plays out for a small island state; we wanted that voice at the table. They don’t speak for some of the least developed countries in the world; we want that voice at the table,” he said.
President David Kabua of the Marshall Islands – an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean vulnerable to rising sea levels – had also received an invite to the summit.
Another group of countries were those who are “leaders, even though they’re not the big players in the space”, said Dr Pershing.
This is where nations such as Singapore and New Zealand fall under.
Singapore, for instance, has innovative solutions in city planning and sustainable development, while New Zealand has innovative programmes on agriculture, said Dr Pershing.
“We were constrained by a virtual format because of Covid-19… But that was the mechanism that we went through to determine who was going to come, and I think it was quite successful,” he said.
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