Every year, hundreds of planes filled with diplomats, lawmakers, scientists and lobbyists, rush towards a designated city, to discuss the protection of our most precious treasure: Planet Earth.
Tracing back to 1995, the Conference Of the Parties (COP) allow United Nations member states to discuss about climate change within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
These COPs effectively enable all inter-governmental decisions regarding climate change to be made, with the common, ratified objective to “stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the climate system.” Other important issues such as ‘Loss and Damage’ due to climate change, climate justice and climate finance are also addressed by scientific experts and politicians.
This year, from 6 to the 21 November, COP30 is held in Belém, a gateway city to the Amazonian region—the so-called ‘lungs of the planet.’
The symbolics of such location are important and offer a stark contrast to the locations of the past three COPs: Egypt, UAE and Azerbaijan. All three countries’ GDPs heavily rely on fossil fuel exports.
Hypocrisy is an unfortunate constant at the COP conferences: this year, lobbyists swarm the grounds of Belém, where it is estimated that 1 in 28 total participants is a fossil fuel lobbyist.
However, it would be hard to go without such rare and unique frameworks, which enable international communication and collaboration between scientific teams, policymakers and diplomats, regardless of how fragile and ineffective they are.
Today, as we are failing to reach ratified environmental targets, such as the 1.5°C limit to global temperature increases set by the Paris Agreement, COP30 is necessary to remind the world that it cannot escape the climate crisis.
It is often said that good health is the biggest luxury, one that is often forgotten and taken for granted, before it dwindles and crumbles. The same principle can apply to this crisis: once all the tipping points will have been reached, there will be no way back.
If COPs fail to find true solutions, our environment will slip from our control, and, with that, life as we know it.
“Action COP30 Promises” by UNclimatechange is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.