COP26 announces the Queen will attend climate conference in person

The Queen is to attend a reception at the conference, Buckingham Palace’s website says

A small portion – £3,208 – of the monarch’s investments was traced to the controversial rent-to-buy firm BrightHouse (Getty)

Queen Elizabeth will attend the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference (COP26) climate change conference to be hosted in Glasgow in November, organisers said today.

Buckingham Palace’s website showed that the Queen is expected to attend a reception at the conference.

World leaders are due to meet at the summit to try to flesh out commitments made in Paris in 2015 aimed at stabilising the planet’s climate and to speed up action to limit climate change.

In July, the Queen and the Princess Royal visited the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI) ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

The Queen spoke to experts from Climate XChange, an independent research group that advises the Scottish government.

On tackling climate change, she had said: “It does mean we are going to have to change the way we do things really, in the end.”

But later that month, it was reported by The Guardian that the Queen’s lawyers secretly lobbied Scottish ministers to change a draft law to exempt her private land from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions.

The exemption means the Queen, one of the largest landowners in Scotland, is the only person in the country not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy – the newspaper states.

In her 2019 Christmas Day speech, the Queen said that she was impressed by young people’s drive to halt environmental damage.

Pope Francis is also due to attend the COP26 conference if his health permits, Scotland’s Roman Catholic bishops said last month.