With COP28 just around the corner, now seems like a good time to explain what it is and why it is so important for global climate action.
COP is the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Conference of Parties. The first COP took place in 1995 in Berlin, Germany, and has continued on a yearly basis since. The COPs are the biggest and most important climate conferences in the world and are where representatives of nations from around the world meet to discuss the world’s climate situation and come up with policies in order to meet the world’s climate goals.
COP28 is the 28th UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Conference of the Parties, which will be held in Abu Dhabi in the UAE from November 30th to December 12th, 2023. With record-high temperatures and increasingly extreme weather events becoming more commonplace, the effects of climate change are more obvious than ever. This is putting a large amount of pressure on the upcoming COP as many people believe that this conference will be a major decider in whether or not the world will achieve its climate goals.
A previous COP also marked an important milestone in the climate crisis. During the 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in 2015, an international climate treaty was signed by 196 nations in Paris, France. This treaty is known as the Paris Agreement, and aims to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” In other words, in signing this treaty, countries must cooperate to limit the planet’s warming to no more than 2°C above temperatures before the industrial revolution (by 2100). Every country creates their own climate action plans, also known as NDCs (nationally determined contributions), which they must follow in order to limit the planet’s warming. The treaty focuses on using a “ratchet mechanism” to gradually create increasingly ambitious NDCs and step up efforts to fight global warming. The Paris Agreement is proof that countries have started to acknowledge that global warming is a serious threat and that they are willing to cooperate to solve the problem.
But is acknowledging the problem enough? While this treaty has achieved some level of success, recent studies are showing that the Paris Agreement alone may not be enough to curb the planet’s warming, and limiting the planet’s warming to a 2°C increase could still cause too much damage to the environment. But the fact that the Paris Agreement was created and signed by so many countries shows that there is still hope, and that with international commitment and cooperation, we can still save our planet. This has also been proven during another recent global crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. With nations around the world working to achieve a common goal, scientists were able to develop a COVID vaccine within less than a year of the pandemic, completely shattering the previous record held by the mumps vaccine which took around 4 years to develop. This is proof that huge strides of progress can be made if we dedicate our time and energy into accomplishing something. And while the short-term effects of COVID-19 were certainly devastating and deadly, the long-term effects of climate change will be much worse if we don’t take action. The COVID-19 pandemic infected nearly 700 million people and took nearly 7 million lives. Climate change is predicted to displace 1.2 billion people by 2050 and cause up to 3.4 million deaths per year, which would put the number of climate change-related deaths up to 91.8 million by 2050. If we can all pull together during the COVID crisis, we can pull together during the climate crisis too.
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