The 5th G7 Summit was held at Tokyo, Japan between June 28 and 29, 1979. The venue for the summit meetings was the State Guesthouse in Tokyo, Japan.

The Group of Seven (G7) was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada (since 1976) and the President of the European Commission (starting officially in 1981). The summits were not meant to be linked formally with wider international institutions; and in fact, a mild rebellion against the stiff formality of other international meetings was a part of the genesis of cooperation between France's President Giscard d'Estaing and West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as they conceived the first Group of Six (G6) summit in 1975.

The G7 is an unofficial annual forum for the leaders of Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

These summit participants are the current "core members" of the international forum:

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

Connie Hedegaard (born 15 September 1960) is a Danish politician and public intellectual who has been European Commissioner for Climate Action in the (second Barroso) European Commission since 10 February 2010.

On behalf of Denmark, she hosted the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009. She was Danish Minister for Climate and Energy from 23 November 2007 as a member of the Cabinet of Anders Fogh Rasmussen III and that of Lars Løkke Rasmussen and had been the Danish Minister for the Environment from 2 August 2004 to 23 November 2007, as a member of the Cabinet of Anders Fogh Rasmussen I and II.

In Denmark, she was a member of the Conservative People's Party (DKF), and was a member of parliament (Folketing) from 10 January 1984 to 3 October 1990. She was also elected a member of the Folketing in the 2005 Danish parliamentary election. Prior to becoming a minister, she worked as a journalist at DR, the Danish national broadcaster.

Taking up her new position at the European Commission on 10 February 2010, Connie Hedegaard stressed the importance of climate change in the 21st century. She hoped that by the end of her five-year term, Europe would be the most climate friendly region in the world. Her priorities would be to implement the European Climate and Energy package and to continue her efforts towards an ambitious international climate agreement.