They will be at centre stage of crucial international climate talks in Scotland on Monday and Tuesday and reflect on what their country is going to do about the threat of global warming.
From US 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 remarks released by his office on 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 on Monday.
In the prelude to COP26, leaders have expressed different opinions.
Christiana Figueres, a former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that COP26 is not going to be a failure.
But she struck a cautious note. "Acting on climate change is not something that I do today. It is actually a commitment that we do for the rest of our lives.
Paris 2015
"And I don't think that we will guarantee 1.5 (degrees Celsius) at the end of this COP.
"It doesn't seem like we're going to hit 100 billion dollars per years in climate financing either and I do not deem that a failure.
"I deem that as taking stock of where we are today, which is sizeably much better than where we were in Paris six years ago," referring to 2015 COP 21 in Paris, that led to the signing of the Paris Agreement.
Biden's climate envoy, John Kerry, tried hard to temper expectations the COP26 will produce major breakthroughs on cutting CO2 emissions.
“Glasgow is the beginning of this decade race, if you will,” said the former US Secretary of State.
Johnson painted an even gloomier picture. He warned that the summit was at serious risk of failure.
His remarks came after two days of preliminary talks at the G20 meeting of world leaders in Rome.
Johnson admitted that little progress had been made and that the COP26 is far from being on track to achieve a deal that keeps the goal alive.
Ambitious target
But Macron sounded more optimistic. He said on social media that France had already made the pledge. "Today all the countries of the G20 affirmed their resolve to take action to limit the temperature to 1.5 degree Celcius," he added.
France had already made the pledge. Today all the countries of the G20 affirmed their resolve to take action to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C. This was the most ambitious target that we established in Paris in 2015. This is progress! Next step: tomorrow at #COP26.
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 31, 2021
Macron does face other problems: he arrives in Glasgow amid tensions with Australia over a cancelled submarine deal and with Britain over fishing rights.
Absences
What will be noticeable are a handful of absences. Xi Jinping, president of top carbon polluting nation China, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also decided not to travel to Glasgow, the state-run Anadolu Agency said on Monday, without citing a reason for the change of plans.
Figueres said the absence of the Chinese leader is not that significant — though Biden chided China over the weekend — because he is not leaving the country during the pandemic and his climate envoy is a veteran negotiator.
More troublesome are several small nations from the Pacific islands that could not make the summer because of Covid-19 restrictions and logistics. That’s a big problem because their voices relay urgency, Figueres said.
Scientists say the chances of meeting the goal to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius this century are slowly slipping away.
The world has already warmed by more than 1.1C and current projections based on planned emissions cuts over the next decade are for it to hit 2.7C by the year 2100.
The amount of energy unleashed by such warming would melt much of the planet’s ice, raise global sea levels and greatly increase the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather, experts say.
(With AP)
