What is COP? - The Climate Question, BBC World Service

COP. The big climate negotiations. The United  Nations climate thing.

Ask most people what exactly COP is they'll probably struggle to explain it, so that's where I come in. I'm Jordan Dunbar and I'm one of the hosts  of The Climate Question podcast from the BBC World Service. In this episode I'm  asking simple questions and getting simple answers and I've invited some climate  experts to help me do just that.

So what is COP? Brazil 1992 and everyone's got big hair,  big suits and they're about to have big talks. Representatives from around the world  have arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first ever Earth summit.

There's never been a day in  human history when so many national leaders have come together in a single place. The United Nations have called a conference to talk about the environment. So here was a tremendous opportunity and an opportunity to do international environmental cooperation in a way that was much more serious about engaging developing countries.

This is the start of a whole series of processes that will need to go on for the rest of your life and far beyond  it in order to protect the environment. From Rio there are three declarations or agreements  and one of them is on the climate which leads to the UNFCCCC no the UNFCCC prepare for a lot of  acronyms. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

This framework or agreement was  the first time countries said 'Hey, let's cooperate and try to keep global temperatures from rising  and we should also try and cope with the damage these growing temperatures are doing'. It  was an historic moment but how did they do that? Something called the IPCC was created, the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A man who knows all about climate change negotiations is Professor Adil Najim. The purpose of the science the IPCC was let us get the world scientists together to advise the policy maker on the state of science of climate change. Right, give us your best assessment every few years on climate change science, how serious is this, how big is this, what  are the type of things that work or do not work?

So we've got a super group of scientists looking at  the best climate science in the world, which gives us an idea of how bad climate change actually  is. Now we just need to get everybody to agree on how to tackle it and that's where the party  starts. Not just any party, a conference of the parties.

The parties are just what they call the  countries who are getting together to negotiate. The formal name is Conference of the Parties  of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but that's not very catchy  so we call them COPs. COPs happen every year in a different country.

Cities bid to host them in  different regions around the world. Welcome to Glasgow. Welcome to Egypt.

Welcome to Marrakesh. Welcome to COP23. Each host country will nominate a president for the negotiations and they can help shape what gets  debated.

The overall point of these COPs is for all the countries that signed that framework, the  UNFCCC, to come to an agreement on how to adapt and limit climate change. It's organised by the  United Nations and they discuss how to reduce planet warming gases being pumped into the sky  and come up with a plan. They then try to come to a global consensus, i.

e. everyone agrees to the plan and signs up to it, but each country is expected to do some homework. For example, come up with a strategy for how they are going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and by how much.

The commitments that  countries make under that are pledges or what are called Nationally Determined Contributions or  NDCs. These pledges allow us to see what countries have and haven't done. Essentially their homework  is marked and it allows the rest of the world to see.

Professor David Victor has studied these  international climate agreements and could write a book about them. In fact, he literally did. And those pledges are flexible, they're updated every five years or more often if a country wants to do that and those are extremely ambitious.

That's where COP is unique. The opportunity to see what progress has been made by countries around the world. Every five years at COP there's a massive show and tell.

It's called a Global Stock Take to score the world's progress. The clock is ticking, we are in the fight  of our lives and we are losing greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep  rising and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. And that's where journalists like me come in.

We're there to make sure what has and hasn't been  done gets reported to people back home. Now let's see what's happened on day one, we can go live to Sharm El-Sheikh and join Jordan Dunbar, who's a reporter from the BBC's The Climate Question podcast. Well Ben as you can probably hear the world leaders have started flying in here in Egypt.

Last year, when I was at COP27 in Egypt, it felt like a mixture of a climate festival, science gathering, business convention, media circus and it even had actual parties. That's a video from a COP party with a  dinosaur called Frankie dancing around a pool with a sign saying 'Don't choose extinction'. As you so.

One night I took a wrong turn at a fancy hotel and ended up in a very swanky drinks reception  for a wind turbine company with an Abba tribute band, which is not what I expected at a climate  conference. Unfortunately security escorted me out. Life on Earth, a unique ecosystem.

Fast forward to  today and COP28, the 28th world climate conference, is about to start in Dubai in the United Arab  Emirates. It's time for action. Join us at COP28.

Over this time the COP has become many things.  So in one way the COP remains a Conference of the Parties, meaning the negotiators from 200  countries in the world trying to come to an agreement, but it has become also a large in my  language in South Asia what would you call a mela a carnival, a major conference, a bringing together  of everyone who is working on climate you know that one seminal event every year which brings  everyone together. So the scientists come, so civil society comes, so business comes, so activists come and it becomes sort of this platform that brings together once in a year all the major players  one side or the others that are working on climate.

It's become almost cool to attend  now. Over 70,000 people are expected at COP28 - politicians, negotiators, climate  scientists, business people from both green and fossil fuel industries,  activists, even celebrities. Watch out.

. . Leonardo DiCaprio there being mobbed when he visited COP26 in Glasgow.

But much more important than film stars is the presence  of what's called civil society. That means ordinary people, not governments or United  Nations employees. Climate activists, business people, indigenous groups, faith leaders.

Having so  many different types of people at the negotiation is crucial says COP veteran Dr Musonda Mumba. Well, you know, just for argument sake I'm from the government of Australia and I really want  to talk about you know the challenges of the fires across Australia but in the room there is  no indigenous Aboriginal person because they get affected more by the challenges and we've seen  this in Canada as well indigenous peoples came up to the floor and said 'Look these fires we've  been warning you for the longest and look at how we're being affected'. How do we hear from  these individuals life in person to hear about their stories, their challenges, their issues,  their narratives?

That can only happen when they are in the room. There's a saying that says  'You cannot talk about us without us'. But getting all those different people together isn't easy.

That popularity means at COP the people whose voices need to be heard sometimes can't afford  to get in the room. The really vulnerable people cannot even afford to get a plane ticket to go.  When the COP was happening in Sharm El-Sheikh all those businesses, all those hotels, just spiked the  prices of the hotel rooms.

I mean it's ridiculous no government is going to pay for a hotel room  for $500 a day for you, no none at all. Do you think COP has achieved bringing in the global  south to these negotiations? It has but it could do more.

The European Union negotiates as a block right they negotiate as 27 countries they come in with about 10 negotiators. A country like you know  Samoa will come with one negotiator. So then you're thinking OK there's a negotiation  process on agriculture over there, there's a negotiation process on on loss and damage over  there, there's another negotiation process all happening in parallel at the same day.

How do  I split myself? Where do I commit to be? Which room shall I be in?

So if you're not in that  room your voice is not at the table, so how do we make sure that this is an equal footing and  it is not an unequal representation there. Away from the main negotiation chambers and away from the nearly 200 countries arguing and debating, the importance of getting the right mix of people at  COP really stands out. That's where real progress ha been made.

The side events have now become bigger than the main intergovernmental event and frankly the side events are a much more important part of COP because they're where commitments by actors other than governments get made in  order to stop emissions that cause climate change. It's made COP a success, it's also made  COP a noisier process because there are all kinds of other things that are happening on the  side. These side events are what I like to think of as climate speed dating.

Companies who want  to try new green technologies and governments or organisations that want to help can get together. They don't have to wait, they can agree amongst themselves and go. For example, the United Kingdom, the United States and the EU got together and came up with a new plan to help South Africa  move away from coal without losing thousands of jobs - a so-called just or fair transition away  from fossil fuels that's also being looked at by Vietnam and Indonesia.

And we got an update on the progress of this deal. Jordan, I know you have an impeccable source on this story. Yes we heard from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at one of the many press conferences happening here in Egypt.

The deal that was struck at COP26 in Glasgow was quite historic. We were actually. .

. It was able to happen because it didn't require everyone to agree to it. But despite having some drawbacks we shouldn't see COP as a total failure.

The right way to measure progress is to compare where we are to where we would have been. So about 15 years ago the world was on track to maybe four or five  degrees Centigrade of warming above pre-industrial levels. Right now we're on track for maybe two and  a half degrees.

So two and a half is not two, that looks like failure, but two and a half is not five.  It's much much lower than five and that I think is the right way to measure progress. Are we doing  enough?

Absolutely not. Should we have started with a better framework 30 years ago? Absolutely,  but we didn't and so now we are where we are.

So why should we care about what happens at  COP? Well even with the problems and its slow pace, COP is still the only international negotiation  on climate of its kind. It's the only show in town.

It's managed to half global warming  since it began in 1995. If the promises it makes on things like money to poorer countries  to fight climate change and a way for those countries to adapt to it, then COP can win  back the trust of those taking part. It also brings attention.

The eyes of the world turn to  climate change albeit for a short time, but this can still encourage change and put pressure  on politicians. And it's given us loads of acronyms and using acronyms makes you look  very clever or A U A M Y L V C as I like to say. If you want more simple answers to simple  climate questions, check out our other explainers: 'What is climate change?

' and 'What is 1. 5°? ' wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you so much to my expert COP friends: Adil Najim, Professor of  International Relations, Earth and Environment at Boston University's Pardee school, DrMusonda Mumba, Secretary General of the Wetlands Convention, David Victor, Professor of Innovation and Public  Policy, University of California, San Diego and to my team - big thanks to my series producer  Alex Lewis and Tom Brignell for all the editing magic.