The UN’s climate science body is pressing ahead with its work despite the US government’s withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this year, the organisation’s top official has said.

According to IPCC chair Jim Skea, around 110 to 120 of the UN body’s 195 members typically show up when it meets.

“So the US has not been there. It’s one country, more or less,” Skea said on the sidelines of the Regional Ecological Summit in Kazakhstan last week.

“The meetings are still working, and we are still making progress.”

Skea said that as an intergovernmental body, the IPCC did not take a position on individual countries, “but we can’t help but observe the huge deployment of renewable energy in China”.

“Chinese companies are also selling their technologies on the international market,” he said, adding that this had “global implications”.