From COP1 to COP28 make sure you know the basics of the world’s biggest climate conference
What is COP?
COP stand for ‘conference of the parties’ and refers to the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Convention). The Convention was devised in 1992 by 154 states at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro. It came into force in 1994.
The Convention established an international environmental treaty to combat ‘dangerous human interference with the climate system’, in part by stabilising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere.
The COP is the supreme decision-making body of the Convention. All states that are parties to the Convention are represented at the COP, at which they review the implementation of the Convention and take decisions necessary to promote its implementation.
The COP meets every year, unless the parties decide otherwise. The COP Presidency rotates among the five recognised UN regions – Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe and Others.
What happened at COP1?
At the first COP, held in Berlin, Germany in March 1995 it became obvious that most of the industrialised countries had not taken adequate measures to achieve the objectives of the Convention. As a result, the Berlin Mandate was adopted, which required the parties to initiate talks to reduce emissions beyond 2000 by means of quantitative objectives and specific deadlines. Two years of negotiations eventually led to the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in Japan at COP 3.
The Kyoto Protocol formalised the aim of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The essential tenet of the Kyoto Protocol was that industrialised nations needed to lessen the amount of their CO2 emissions. It recognised that these nations contributed more to climate change and established two groups of countries: Annex I contained developed nations, and Non-Annex I referred to developing countries.
The protocol placed emission limitations on Annex I countries only. Non-Annex I nations participated by investing in projects designed to lower emissions in their countries. 37 industrialised nations plus the EU were mandated to cut their GHG emissions. Developing nations were asked to comply voluntarily, and more than 100 developing countries, including China and India, were exempted from the Kyoto agreement altogether.
What is the Paris Climate Agreement and what happened at COP21?
The Paris Climate Agreement replaced the Kyoto Protocol and was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016.
Its overarching goal is 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’.
This limit was chosen because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.
The Paris Agreement works on a five-year cycle of increasingly ambitious climate action – or, ratcheting up – carried out by countries. Since 2020, countries have been submitting their national climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
In their NDCs, countries communicate actions they will take to reduce their GHG emissions in order to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement. These are voluntary plans and there are no sanctions for failure to comply. Countries also communicate in their NDCs actions they will take to build resilience to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Each successive NDC is meant to reflect an increasingly higher degree of ambition compared to the previous version.
What has happened since the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted?
At COPs since Paris, it has become increasingly clear that NDCs are not ambitious enough if we are to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. While there has been progress, with more and more countries, cities and companies establishing carbon neutrality targets, conferences have been used to call for more ambitious plans.
