Why COPs fail

For two weeks every year — pandemics permitting — several tens of thousands of negotiators, scientists, activists, lobbyists and journalists come together to debate how to tackle climate change, forgoing sleep and good coffee in pursuit of an agreement that displeases everyone equally.

There have been 26 COPs (Conference of the Parties) to date, each turning up their fair share of legalistic jargon, bombastic speeches, double-crossing, tears, tantrums and at least one fainting.

For years large emitters sought to weaponise the UN-led bureaucratic process to deny the problem and then delay action, arguing in small print over the precise cause of the leak even as the ship took on ever more water.

With louder warnings from scientists and calls for action from protesters, there is today at least a (near) universal acknowledgement from the 197 parties who attend COP that climate change is indeed an emergency.

But the pace of the crisis is still vastly outstripping governments’ willingness or ability to act. That lack of urgency is in part inbuilt to COP. When national interests collide, momentum inevitably suffers.

For historic polluters the focus at climate summits has long been mitigation — reducing emissions using tech they happen to make. Poorer nations want more done on adaptation to help them cope. Increasingly, countries already battered by extreme weather are asking for compensation for this “loss and damage”.

But COP is hampered by incumbency; the rules and even the format of negotiations cannot be changed without unanimous consent, something as rare at the two-week jamboree as eight solid hours of sleep.

Even as Earth reels from ever fiercer flooding, drought and storm fronts supercharged by rising seas, government representatives at COP are still locked in technical discussions over how they should report the little action they are taking.

In the nearly three decades since countries started working to solve the climate crisis, most summits — including COP26 in Glasgow this month — have focussed on how they can keep using the fossil fuels driving the problem.

All told, the best national plans, submitted at COP under the framework of the Paris Agreement, have shaved around 1.3C off 21st Century…