How much will Trump’s opposition matter to climate action?

Tackling climate change has always been about more than one state, writes Hannah Hughes

Activists participate in a demonstration against carbon markets at the Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. Picture: AP

US president-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he will again withdraw his country from the Paris agreement and perhaps the UN climate process altogether. The uncertainty this has created was palpable in the negotiation rooms and hallways of the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I wrote this.

I have studied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its global assessments of scientific knowledge for over 15 years and have followed how its most recent reports are being used in official climate negotiations. As I document in my book, the US and its domestic politics has influenced the organisation of global climate science, and the climate agreements that depend on it, since the IPCC was established in 1988.