This year marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. COP = Conference of the Parties. In diplomatic language “the parties” refers to the 197 nations that agreed to the new environmental pact.
Thirty years of talking about Climate Change. Thirty years of empty promises, agreements & resolutions not fulfilled. Thirty years of increasing scientific evidence of just how much we are destroying the world we live in.
The Paris Agreement is the legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was a landmark in the multilateral climate change process because, for the first time, a binding agreement brings all nations into a common cause, to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement
Iran and Libya – both among the 14-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) – as well as Yemen and Eritrea have not ratified the agreement. The US withdrew under Trump, from November 2020. Biden rejoined the pact on his first day in office, 20 January 2021, and formally re-entered the global treaty 30 days later.
Inside Climte News reports “Our results indicate that the framework of the agreement is working pretty well. The Paris Agreement is getting countries to make ambitious pledges; last year nearly all countries updated those pledges and made them even more ambitious. What’s needed next is better systems for checking to see whether countries are actually delivering what they promise.”
We have to continue to hold countries & politicians to account. Greta Thunberg notably isn't going to COP27. She reckons it’s just a chance for the powerful to get away with “greenwashing, lying and cheating”, and that the annual summits of national governments, policy experts, spruikers and hangers-on aren’t working. At COP26 Countries agreed to limit global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – an advancement on the landmark 2015 Paris agreement – and acknowledged that meant immediately considering how to ratchet up action this decade. But 2022 has not delivered on that promise. Only 24 countries have updated their voluntary pledges to the UN, and only India and Australia have taken noteworthy strides forward, the latter from a very low base.
An estimated 35,000 people from government, Indigenous nations, climate groups and fossil-fuel multinationals will be getting on planes to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in the hopes of hastening (or hindering) the global movement to net zero. “It’s like a giant trade fair with Greenpeace at one kiosk and Exxon at the next,” said one lifelong environmentalist who stayed home.
My cynical brain asks what the Carbon cost of that will be.
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