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US President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Mar 25, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Joe Biden on Friday (Mar 26) invited 40 world leaders, including Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, to attend the Leaders Summit on Climate next month, the White House announced. 

It will be held virtually Apr 22 and 23.

"The Leaders Summit on Climate will underscore the urgency – and the economic benefits – of stronger climate action.  It will be a key milestone on the road to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow," the White House said in a press release. 

President Joe Biden is including rivals Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China among the invitees to the first big climate talks of his administration, an event the US hopes will help shape, speed up and deepen global efforts to cut climate-wrecking fossil fuel pollution, administration officials told The Associated Press.

Other world leaders include Indonesia's President Joko Widodo, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. 

Biden is seeking to revive a US-convened forum of the world’s major economies on climate that George W Bush and Barack Obama both used and Donald Trump let languish. Leaders of some of the world’s top climate-change sufferers, do-gooders and backsliders round out some of the rest of the 40 invitations being delivered Friday.

Hosting the summit will fulfil a campaign pledge and executive order by Biden, and the administration is timing the event with its own upcoming announcement of what’s a much tougher US target for revamping the US economy to sharply cut emissions from coal, natural gas and oil.The session will test Biden’s pledge to make climate change a priority among competing political, economic, policy and pandemic problems. It also will pose a very public - and potentially embarrassing or empowering - test of whether US leaders, and Biden in particular, can still drive global decision-making after the Trump administration withdrew globally and shook up longstanding alliances.

The Biden administration intentionally looked beyond its international partners for the talks, an administration official said.

“It’s a list of the key players and it’s about having some of the tough conversations and the important conversations,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss US plans for the event. “Given how important … this issue is to the entire world, we have to be willing to talk about it and we have to be willing to talk about it at the high levels.”The Biden administration hopes the stage provided by next month’s Earth Day climate summit - planned to be all virtual because of COVID-19 and all publicly viewable on livestream, including breakout conversations - will encourage other international leaders to use it as a platform to announce their own countries’ tougher emission targets or other commitments, ahead of November’s UN global climate talks in Glasgow//CNA