COP. The big climate negotiations. The United Nations climate thing.
Ask most people what exactly COP is they'll probably struggle to explain it, so that's where I come in.
I'm Jordan Dunbar and I'm one of the hosts of The Climate Question podcast from the
BBC World Service. In this episode I'm asking simple questions and getting
simple answers and I've invited some climate experts to help me do just that. So what is COP?
Brazil 1992 and everyone's got big hair, big suits and they're about to have big talks.
Representatives from around the world have arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first ever Earth summit.
There's never been a day in human history when so many national leaders
have come together in a single place.
The United Nations have called a conference to talk about the environment.
So here was a tremendous opportunity and an opportunity to do international environmental cooperation in a way that was much more serious about engaging developing countries.
This is the start of a whole series of processes that will need to go
on for the rest of your life and far beyond it in order to protect the environment.
From Rio there are three declarations or agreements and one of them is on the climate which leads
to the UNFCCCC no the UNFCCC prepare for a lot of acronyms. The United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change. This framework or agreement was the first time countries said 'Hey, let's cooperate
and try to keep global temperatures from rising and we should also try and cope with the damage
these growing temperatures are doing'. It was an historic moment but how did they do that?
Something called the IPCC was created, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A man who knows all about climate change negotiations is Professor Adil Najim.
The purpose of the science the IPCC was let us get the world scientists together to advise the policy maker on the state of science of climate change.
Right, give us your best assessment every few years on climate change
science, how serious is this, how big is this, what are the type of things that work or do not work?
So we've got a super group of scientists looking at the best climate science in the world, which gives
us an idea of how bad climate change actually is. Now we just need to get everybody to agree
on how to tackle it and that's where the party starts. Not just any party, a conference of the parties.
The parties are just what they call the countries who are getting together to negotiate.
The formal name is Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change, but that's not very catchy so we call them COPs. COPs happen every year
in a different country. Cities bid to host them in different regions around the world.
Welcome to Glasgow.
Welcome to Egypt. Welcome to Marrakesh. Welcome to COP23.
Each host country will nominate a president for the negotiations and they can help shape what gets debated. The overall point of these COPs is for
all the countries that signed that framework, the UNFCCC, to come to an agreement on how to adapt
and limit climate change. It's organised by the United Nations and they discuss how to reduce
planet warming gases being pumped into the sky and come up with a plan. They then try to come to a
global consensus, i.e. everyone agrees to the plan and signs up to it, but each country is expected to do
some homework. For example, come up with a strategy for how they are going to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions and by how much. The commitments that countries make under that are pledges or what
are called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs. These pledges allow us to see what countries
have and haven't done. Essentially their homework is marked and it allows the rest of the world
to see. Professor David Victor has studied these international climate agreements and could write a
book about them. In fact, he literally did.
And those pledges are flexible, they're updated every five years or more often if a country wants to do that and those are extremely ambitious.
That's where COP is unique. The opportunity to see what progress has been made by countries around the world.
Every five years at COP there's a massive show and tell. It's called a Global Stock Take to score the world's progress.
The clock is ticking, we are in the fight of our lives and we are losing greenhouse gas
emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising and our planet is fast approaching tipping
points that will make climate chaos irreversible.
And that's where journalists like me come in. We're there to make sure what has and hasn't been done gets reported to people back home.
Now let's see what's happened on day one, we can go live to Sharm El-Sheikh and join Jordan Dunbar, who's a reporter from
the BBC's The Climate Question podcast.
Well Ben as you can probably hear the world leaders have started flying in here in Egypt.
Last year, when I was at COP27 in Egypt, it felt like a mixture of a climate festival, science gathering, business convention, media circus and it even had actual parties.
That's a video from a COP party with a dinosaur called Frankie dancing around a pool
with a sign saying 'Don't choose extinction'. As you so. One night I took a wrong turn at a fancy hotel
and ended up in a very swanky drinks reception for a wind turbine company with an Abba tribute
band, which is not what I expected at a climate conference. Unfortunately security escorted me out.
Life on Earth, a unique ecosystem. Fast forward to today and COP28, the 28th world climate conference,
is about to start in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
It's time for action. Join us at COP28.
Over this time the COP has become many things. So in one way the COP remains a Conference of the Parties, meaning the negotiators from 200 countries in the world trying to come to an
agreement, but it has become also a large in my language in South Asia what would you call a mela
a carnival, a major conference, a bringing together of everyone who is working on climate you know
that one seminal event every year which brings everyone together. So the scientists come, so civil
society comes, so business comes, so activists come and it becomes sort of this platform that brings
together once in a year all the major players one side or the others that are working on climate.
It's become almost cool to attend now. Over 70,000 people are expected at
COP28 - politicians, negotiators, climate scientists, business people from both
green and fossil fuel industries, activists, even celebrities.
Watch out... Leonardo DiCaprio there being mobbed when he visited COP26 in Glasgow. But much more
important than film stars is the presence of what's called civil society. That means
ordinary people, not governments or United Nations employees. Climate activists, business
people, indigenous groups, faith leaders. Having so many different types of people at the negotiation
is crucial says COP veteran Dr Musonda Mumba.
Well, you know, just for argument sake I'm from the government of Australia and I really want to talk about you know the challenges of the
fires across Australia but in the room there is no indigenous Aboriginal person because they get
affected more by the challenges and we've seen this in Canada as well indigenous peoples came
up to the floor and said 'Look these fires we've been warning you for the longest and look
at how we're being affected'. How do we hear from these individuals life in person to hear about
their stories, their challenges, their issues, their narratives? That can only happen when
they are in the room. There's a saying that says 'You cannot talk about us without us'.
But getting all those different people together isn't easy. That popularity means at COP the people whose
voices need to be heard sometimes can't afford to get in the room. The really vulnerable people
cannot even afford to get a plane ticket to go. When the COP was happening in Sharm El-Sheikh all
those businesses, all those hotels, just spiked the prices of the hotel rooms. I mean it's ridiculous
no government is going to pay for a hotel room for $500 a day for you, no none at all.
Do you think COP has achieved bringing in the global south to these negotiations?
It has but it could do more. The European Union negotiates as a block right they negotiate as 27 countries they come in
with about 10 negotiators. A country like you know Samoa will come with one negotiator. So then
you're thinking OK there's a negotiation process on agriculture over there, there's a
negotiation process on on loss and damage over there, there's another negotiation process all
happening in parallel at the same day. How do I split myself? Where do I commit to be? Which
room shall I be in? So if you're not in that room your voice is not at the table, so how do
we make sure that this is an equal footing and it is not an unequal representation there.
Away from the main negotiation chambers and away from the nearly 200 countries arguing and debating, the
importance of getting the right mix of people at COP really stands out. That's where real progress ha been made.
The side events have now become bigger than the main intergovernmental event
and frankly the side events are a much more important part of COP because they're where commitments
by actors other than governments get made in order to stop emissions that cause climate change.
It's made COP a success, it's also made COP a noisier process because there are all
kinds of other things that are happening on the side. These side events are what I like to think
of as climate speed dating. Companies who want to try new green technologies and governments or
organisations that want to help can get together. They don't have to wait, they can agree amongst
themselves and go. For example, the United Kingdom, the United States and the EU got together and
came up with a new plan to help South Africa move away from coal without losing thousands
of jobs - a so-called just or fair transition away from fossil fuels that's also being looked at by
Vietnam and Indonesia.
And we got an update on the progress of this deal. Jordan, I know you have an impeccable source on this story.
Yes we heard from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at one of the many press conferences happening here in Egypt.
The deal that was struck at COP26 in Glasgow
was quite historic. We were actually...
It was able to happen because it didn't require everyone to agree to it. But despite having some drawbacks we shouldn't see COP as a total failure.
The right way to measure progress is to compare where we are to where we would have been. So about 15 years
ago the world was on track to maybe four or five degrees Centigrade of warming above pre-industrial
levels. Right now we're on track for maybe two and a half degrees. So two and a half is not two, that
looks like failure, but two and a half is not five. It's much much lower than five and that I think is
the right way to measure progress. Are we doing enough? Absolutely not. Should we have started with a
better framework 30 years ago? Absolutely, but we didn't and so now we are where we are.
So why should we care about what happens at COP? Well even with the problems and its slow pace,
COP is still the only international negotiation on climate of its kind. It's the only show in
town. It's managed to half global warming since it began in 1995. If the promises it
makes on things like money to poorer countries to fight climate change and a way for those
countries to adapt to it, then COP can win back the trust of those taking part. It also
brings attention. The eyes of the world turn to climate change albeit for a short time, but this
can still encourage change and put pressure on politicians. And it's given us loads of
acronyms and using acronyms makes you look very clever or A U A M Y L V C as I like to say.
If you want more simple answers to simple climate questions, check out our other explainers:
'What is climate change?' and 'What is 1.5°?' wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much to
my expert COP friends: Adil Najim, Professor of International Relations, Earth and Environment
at Boston University's Pardee school, Dr Musonda Mumba, Secretary General of the Wetlands Convention,
David Victor, Professor of Innovation and Public Policy, University of California, San Diego and
to my team - big thanks to my series producer Alex Lewis and Tom Brignell for all the editing magic.