The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Mexico, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela will be part of the strong Latin American participation.

The event will see world leaders come together with the task of setting a binding agenda for halting global warming for the first time since the 2009 Copenhagen summit. It aims to lay the groundwork for establishing a global climate change agreement in 2015.

The Copenhagen meeting, generally regarded as a failure, ended with an acknowledgement of the need to keep world temperatures from rising from more than two degrees, but no binding agreement was made to regulate greenhouse gases and cut emissions.

Most of these countries attribute the failure to halt global warming to the unwillingness of major industrialized powers to adopt the necessary measures to reduce emissions.

Discussions at the summit will center on reaching a worldwide agreement on such measures whilst guaranteeing sustainable development and an end to existing income gaps between rich and poor nations.

Emphasis will be placed on the difficulties faced by nations in development, including islands that could disappear as sea level rises.

The summit will coincide with a march in New York City and protests in other major world cities in which tens of thousands of people are expected to demand concrete actions to end global warming and promote clean energy.