World leaders and business executives will flock to New York City next week with plans to expand clean energy and enhance the flow of climate cash to peril-prone countries in a last-ditch effort to shape environmental issues ahead of a U.S. election that threatens to undermine global climate goals.
Hanging over them all is the specter of former President Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House.
New York Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly, both of which begin next week, have outsize importance this year given their timing before two blockbuster events: The contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, followed by global climate talks in Azerbaijan known as COP29, six days later.
That makes New York a prime place for country leaders and corporate executives to huddle behind closed doors to discuss the potential repercussions of a victory by Harris or Trump, who has called climate change a hoax and said he would pull the U.S. out of the U.N.-brokered Paris Agreement.
