COP30: Trump and many leaders are skipping it, so does the summit still have a point?

COP30: Trump and many leaders are skipping it, so does the summit still have a point?10 November 2025ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleJustin RowlattClimate EditorBBCThere is a photograph, taken ten years ago in Paris, that today seems like something of a relic.In it, dozens of men and women line up in dark suits, in front of an enormous sign that reads COP21 Paris. Right in the middle the UK's then-Prime Minister, David Cameron, grins widely, as he stands beside the future King Charles III, just in front of China’s Xi Jinping. Far off to the right is the then US President Barack Obama, deep in conversation with someone who is cut off from the frame - because there were so many leaders lining up that day that it was difficult for the photographer to capture them all at once. AFP via Getty ImagesThere were so many world leaders at the summit in Paris ten years ago that the photographers struggled to capture them all together. Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi attended COP that year tooWhat a far cry from the family photograph taken on Thursday with this year's line-up at the COP30 summit in Brazil.Xi and Modi were no-shows, along with the leaders of around 160 other countries. And notably absent was the US President Donald Trump. In fact, the Trump administration has exited the process entirely and has said it will not send any high-level officials this year.Which raises the question, why have a two-week-long multinational gathering at all if so many leaders aren’t there?Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN's climate process under whose leadership the Paris Agreement was struck, said during last year's gathering that the COP process was "not fit for purpose.""The golden era for multilateral diplomacy is over," agrees Joss Garman, a former climate activist who now heads a new think tank called Loom.Anadolu via Getty ImagesThere were comparatively far fewer world leaders in this year‘s photo at COP, which is held in a h...