The summit will attempt to create a plan of action to tackle climate change and reduce global emissions. 

This discrepancy between what the UN believes needs to be done to rein in climate change and what countries are prepared to do is the biggest challenge that COP26 attendees would need to tackle.

The COP26 climate summit is set to begin next Sunday in Glasgow. The summit has been touted as one of the most important international events for the past few years—an event where world leaders will attempt to come up with a concerted effort to reduce emissions. But there are multiple factors working against the summit's success.

As many as 25,000 delegates are expected to attend the summit that will last for two weeks as world leaders try to agree on a range of issues covering what needs to be done to bring emissions under control and how we are going to pay for it. The principal aim of the meeting is to tailor a mechanism for implementing the goals of the Paris Agreement with a view to containing global temperature rises to an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.

Climate change has been identified by a number of international agencies, multinational businesses, and environmental organizations as the biggest threat to humankind at the moment, so urgent action is needed. The point of COP26 is to define the steps of this action and how it will be taken. However, it may well fall short of expectations.

Just days before the summit begins, the BBC uncovered documents that showed some nations have lobbied for changes in the latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change that made some alarming conclusions about the state of the planet's climate as a result of human activity and called for urgent changes to our way of life to contain the adverse changes.