What is COP?
COP refers to the Conference of the Parties.
The Conference of Parties refers to those countries who joined – and are thus a “party to,” in legal terms – an international treaty called the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The COP signatories commit to take voluntary actions to prevent climate change disasters.
Countries forming the COP take turns hosting an annual meeting at which representatives of the countries’ governments report on progress, set targets & goals, and share scientific and technological progress in the fight against climate change.
In 2023, the COP (COP 28), will be held in Dubai, UAE.
In 2022, the COP was held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and in 2021, at Glasgow, Scotland.
One of the most prominent COPs was COP 21 that was held in 2015 at Paris.
The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 was the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The conference negotiated the Paris Agreement, a global agreement on the reduction of climate change, the text of which represented a consensus of the representatives of the 196 parties attending it. The agreement will enter into force when joined by at least 55 countries which together represent at least 55 percent of global greenhouse emissions. In April 2016, 174 countries signed the agreement in New York, and began adopting it within their own legal systems.
According to the organizing committee at the outset of the talks, the expected key result was an agreement to set a goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2 °C per year compared to pre-industrial levels”. The agreement calls for zero net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to be reached during the second half of the 21st century. In the adopted version of the Paris Agreement, the parties will also “pursue efforts to” limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C. The 1.5 °C goal will require zero emissions sometime between 2030 and 2050, according to estimates.
Prior to the conference, 146 national climate panels publicly presented draft national climate contributions (called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions”, INDCs). These suggested commitments were estimated to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. For example, the EU suggested INDC is a commitment to a 40 percent reduction in emissions by 2030 compared to 1990.
The agreement establishes a “global stocktake” which revisits the national goals to “update and enhance” them every five years beginning 2023. However, no detailed timetable or country-specific goals for emissions were incorporated into the Paris Agreement – as opposed to the previous Kyoto Protocol.
