What is COP28?
I’m going to COP28 in Dubai in a couple of weeks. I’m planning to chronicle the adventure here, but thought I should I write a bit beforehand too. Call it the Pre-Adventure.
Today’s installment attempts to answer the question, “What is COP28?”
What’s a COP?
If you stick with me on this adventure for the next month, you’re going to be subjected to a lot of acronyms. The first is COP (pronounced: cop) and stands for “Conference of the Parties.” That sounds like it should be a good time! But no, it is not a gathering of festival goers. In this context, “party” refers to a group of people like, “Seinfeld, party of four.”
Back in 1992 there were 154 parties — all representatives of different nations — that met in Rio and agreed to the UNFCCC (pronounced: you en eff triple sea), which is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Those 154 parties pledged to address the dangerous interference that humans have had on our climate (I’ll write more about that in future installments). Then they met for the first time in 1995 to start negotiating what everyone should do. That gathering was held in Berlin and called COP1.
There has been another COP every year since then (except in 2020 because of the pandemic), and they are numbered sequentially. At…
