China is ‘walking the walk’ on climate action leadership say green industry figures

For the first time, the U.S. did not send a delegation to COP—the UN conference where countries roll out action plans to mitigate climate change. This comes after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in January, calling it ‘unfair’ and ‘one-sided’—and removing the world’s largest historical emitter from the fight against climate change.

But green industry leaders say this doesn’t mean that climate diplomacy is dead.

“When there’s a vacuum, something or someone will fill it. In the climate leadership space, we now see many countries from the Global South stepping up,” said Faroze Nadar, the executive director of the UN Global Compact Network Malaysia and Brunei, at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Tuesday.

He pointed to the ongoing COP30 in Belém, Br