China bows out of hosting Cop33 climate summit in 2028

China has ruled out hosting the Cop33 UN climate summit in 2028, according to the Guardian, after months of internal deliberations. The move leaves the field open for other Asian countries to take the 2028 slot, which UN Framework Convention on Climate Change rules reserve for the region. It lands as a disappointment for governments and climate experts who had wanted the world's biggest emitter to take the global stage while the US under Donald Trump has pulled back from international climate cooperation.

Al Gore was blunt about the lost opportunity. "I would be very much in favour of that idea," the former US vice-president told the Guardian. "It's too bad." Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, called China a formidable contender, saying it leads the world on clean energy investment, manufacturing and deployment, with emissions starting to tick down. "As a leadership story, China hosting Cop33 would be a big deal," he said.

Nobody has said publicly why China passed. Experts who spoke to the Guardian pointed to the US electoral calendar: Americans vote for president on 7 November 2028, and Cop33 is scheduled for 6 to 17 November that year. Democrats had a strong midterm showing with climate concern seen as a factor, but Trump would still be in office until January 2029. He rejects climate science, pulled the US out of the Paris agreement and is also exiting its parent 1992 treaty, the UNFCCC.

China's own energy shift is well underway. Renewable generation capacity has overtaken coal there, greenhouse gas emissions appear to have edged down this year, and electric vehicles made up nearly two-thirds of the market last month. Clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country's investment growth last year, a point former US secretary of state John Kerry made when he told the Guardian China was leaving the rest of the world behind on low-carbon technology.

China wants to be seen as a leader among developing countries but has been cautious about filling the space the US vacated. Under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Washington and Beijing worked closely, setting joint targets on methane and clean tech. India also weighed a Cop33 bid for months this year and declined, while its coal use keeps climbing even as it beats its own renewable energy targets. Uzbekistan, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand are among the countries now mulling a bid, and no host is likely to be picked at Cop31, currently running in Turkey under Turkish and Australian joint presidency.

The 2028 summit carries a heavy agenda: it includes the global stocktake, the Paris agreement mechanism that checks whether countries are on track for the 1.5C limit. That limit is now certain to be surpassed, and experts say the focus should shift to minimising the temperature overshoot and the extreme weather that comes with it.