3 min readNew DelhiApr 8, 2026 08:37 PM IST
India is learnt to be no longer interested in hosting the COP33 climate meeting in 2028, official sources said on Wednesday. India had not formally bid for the event, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made the offer in December 2023, during the COP28 meeting in Dubai.
COP, or Conference of Parties, is the annual meeting of the signatories to the 1994 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It also serves as the meeting of the signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement, and 1997 Kyoto Protocol. These meetings decide the global course of action on climate change.
The sources did not spell out the reasons for India’s change of mind, but the rethink had been happening in government circles for the last one year. This, despite the fact that a COP33 cell had been set up under the Climate Change division in the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change to prepare the country for hosting the event last year.
There was a growing realisation within the government that as the host and President of the conference, India would be expected to champion and prioritise the global cause on climate change which could sometimes come in conflict with its own national positions on many climate-related issues. Global events in the last few years, on the climate front and elsewhere, had substantially altered the situation from the time India had made the offer in 2023.
The COP meeting is organised by rotation in each of the five UN-classified regions. India falls in the Asia-Pacific region whose turn it is to host the meeting in 2028. The choice of the host is made by consensus within the region. Usually, the host country, and city, is finalised two years in advance, but sometimes the decision is delayed due to lack of candidates or absence of consensus in the event of multiple countries staking claim. In the last COP meeting in Brazil in November 2025, for example, it was decided that COP31 event would take place in Ankara, Turkey, but would be co-hosted by Turkey and Australia who had both put in bids. The next year’s event, COP32 in 2027, has gone to Ethiopia.
The question of COP33 host would be taken up only at this year’s climate meeting in Turkey. There is no other offer similar to that of India from any other country right now.
India has hosted this meeting once earlier, when Delhi had organised the COP8 event. But the scale of the meeting was substantially smaller at that time, and the event was barely noticed outside climate circles. In the last decade and a half, the climate meetings have emerged as one of the most high-profile events globally, many times attracting hundreds of heads of states and governments, and the who’s who of business and technology world.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
