Let’s start with a little history. First of all, COP stands for Conference of the Parties under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Parties to the conference, including 196 countries as well as the European Union, supposedly agreed to “take decisions necessary to promote the effective implementation of the Convention, including institutional and administrative arrangements.” According to the United Nations, the first COP meeting was held in Berlin in March 1995. This year is the 27th annual meeting.

In 2015, the parties entered into what has become know as The Paris Agreement. The goal was for parties to take actions designed to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. This, it was assumed, would significantly reduce risks and impacts of climate change. It differentiated between developed and developing countries, tasking developing countries to continue enhancing their mitigation efforts; and tasking developed countries with providing support for them as well as pursuing their own carbon reduction efforts.

Fast forward to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, two significant factors that have had an impact on the good intentions of both developed and developing countries, and in many cases, even in developed countries, increasing use of fossil fuels due to shortages and price increases caused by the war and other global political conditions.