PARIS, France (AFP) – Representatives of nearly 200 countries gather Monday to continue fraught negotiations on the timing and content of the UN’s next blockbuster assessment of global warming science.

The meeting in the Chinese city of Hangzhou comes on the heels of the hottest year on record and rising alarm over the pace of warming.

Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement will also cast a shadow, with media reports suggesting Washington will not send a delegation to the five-day meeting.

The talks aim to flesh out plans for the next landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988 to inform policymakers.

At issue is whether the three-part assessment — covering physical science, climate impacts and solutions for reducing greenhouse gas levels — can be produced quickly enough to inform a crucial 2028 UN “stocktake” of the global response to rising temperatures.

Many wealthy countries and developing nations most exposed to climate impacts support an accelerated timetable, but face objections by some oil producers and major polluters with rising emissions, such as India and China.

The High Ambition Coalition of European and climate vulnerable countries said grounding the 2028 UN progress report in up-to-date science was a crucial part of the Paris climate deal, and warned that severing that link “would undermine its credibility and integrity”.

“We owe it to everyone suffering the impacts of the climate crisis now, and to future generations, to make decisions about our planet’s future on the basis of the best evidence and knowledge available to us,” it said on Saturday.

The UN’s first stocktake, published in 2023, was a damning indictment of the lack of progress on tackling warming.

In response, countries at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai issued a groundbreaking call for the world to move away from fossil fuels, albeit cushioned by concessions to oil and gas interests.

For its seventh major report since 1990, the IPCC has suggested a timeline that would see its conclusions published in 2028.

But China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India were among the countries that pushed back against this timing, arguing among other things that the process would be too rushed, according to reports from previous meetings by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.