President Obama will join roughly 120 heads of state who will attend the Sept. 23 United Nations climate summit in New York, according to a U.N. document regarding the event.
Other notables include British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Francois Hollande, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, South African President Jacob Zuma and South Korean President Park Geun-Hye.
The summit, viewed as a precursor to international climate negotiations next year in Paris, also has attracted attention for who isn’t coming.
The leaders of the top and third greenhouse gas-emitting nations — Xi Jinping of China and Narendra Modi of India — will be absent. Neither Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, German Chancellor Angela Merkel nor Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott will attend. Most scientists blame greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, for global warming.
Harper, however, will participate in a dinner hosted by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that will focus on climate change. And Modi will be in the United States next week to meet with Obama, with climate change among the expected topics of discussion.
Christiana Figueres, the U.N. climate chief, has said some of the bigger names sitting out the New York event won’t dim the hopes of building momentum for the Paris talks. Those negotiations are viewed as a last chance to lock in agreements to cut enough greenhouse gases by 2020 to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise by 2100.
“I would not recommend we read too much into the person who is going to be speaking for the Chinese and India governments,” Figueres said, according to online publication Responding to Climate Change. “The fact is that they had fully intended to be represented at the top level and for reasons that have nothing to do with the climate summit at the at the last minute they are not able to be there.”
