This second post in the COP26 series comprises some recent history, along with some challenging organisational names and acronyms!
I will begin with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, sometimes known as the UN FCCC. The UN FCCC is a United Nations treaty that has, as its ultimate aim, preventing dangerous human interference with the climate system. Given that we are in the final stages of preparations for the 26th international conference to try and solve the problem of climate breakdown, you could argue that it has failed in this aim.
Since coming into force on 21 March 1994, this UN treaty has achieved near universal approval with 197 national governments having signed it. The signatories have gained the status of “Parties to the Convention”. This process of signing or approving an international treaty is known as “ratification”. Since the UN FCCC was ratified, there have been 25 Conferences of the Parties or COPs.
The “Parties” referred to in the title Conference of the Parties are the parties to the convention – the 197 national governments who ratified the treaty.
Beyond being a treaty or agreement between national governments, the UN FCCC is also the body which is responsible for the United Nations response to climate breakdown. Part of this response is organising these Conferences of the Parties.
A couple of these conferences have resulted in some modest gains, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. But most of them have passed off without much fanfare and with few tangible results. Some, such as the conference in Copenhagen in 2009 was eagerly anticipated by climate scientists and activists. It promised a great deal and delivered very little.
The most notable recent COP was COP21. This took place in Paris in 2015 and led to the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement brings all nations into a common cause based on their historic, current and future responsibilities for emitting climate changing gases. That is, it looks back to emissions that countries have been responsible for in the past, looks at the current situation and tries to predict what may happen in the future in an attempt to assign levels of responsibility to different nations.
The Paris Agreement confirmed that it is national governments who hold the key to meaningful action with each of the Parties to the Agreement pledging to prepare, communicate and maintain successive “Nationally Determined Contributions” or NDCs that it intends to achieve. The “contributions” are the quantity of greenhouse gases they each intend to emit over coming years and the idea is that the sum of all the NDCs should be less than the total emissions of greenhouse gases that will keep us below the 2 degree threshold that was agreed as the aim of the talks.
This is an example of a principle known as “common but differentiated responsibilities”. This principle recognises that while all nations have a common responsibility to deal with climate breakdown, different states have different levels of responsibility, depending on their stage of development and their historic contributions to emissions of climate changing gases.
The problem is that the total of all the NDCs does not equate to a big enough reduction in global emissions to meet the target of the Paris Agreement so further rounds of contributions are required to improve on existing commitments.
Given the UK’s role in COP 26, our government could be seen to be in a position of moral authority in relation to the NDCs. Unfortunately, despite some challenging future targets for reaching “net zero”, the government’s actions during 2021 have cast doubt on their real commitment to taking the action necessary to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. These include increased commitments to road building, a failure to dismiss plans for a new deep coal mine in Cumbria and additional funding for oil exploration in the North Sea.
All this talk of COPs and NDCs and treaties and conventions can easily detract from the real issue of reducing our emissions of the gases that are leading to climate breakdown. Meaningful, lasting and effective action to reduce these emissions is what we need to see in early November in Glasgow!
In the next post, we will look back briefly to understand why the conference in Glasgow is a year later than planned.