BRIEFING: MAKING COP26 COUNT
What is COP26 and why is it important? The climate ‘Conference of Parties’ – or COP1 as we know it – was created with the purpose of monitoring and reviewing the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Dilraj Sokhi-Watson provides the context.
1. 100 political Heads of Government have confirmed their attendance to The World Leaders’ Summit at #COP26. This is the largest political gathering that the UK has ever hosted.
Dilraj Sokhi-Watson
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United Nations created and adopted a global climate change treaty called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The objective of the UNFCCC is to ‘stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere’ to a level which is short of being harmful. This treaty has been ratified by 197 states or ‘parties’ (including the UK).
The objective of the IPCC is to provide governments at all levels scientific information to help formulate climate policies. The UNFCCC is guided by scientific assessments from the IPCC.
The UNFCCC secretariat supports all institutions involved in the international climate change negotiations, particularly the Conference of the Parties (COP). The purpose of the climate COP is to monitor and review the implementation of the UNFCCC.
To date the IPCC has delivered five Assessment Reports, the most comprehensive scientific reports about climate change produced worldwide. Part 1 of the 6th Assessment report was published in August 2021 and will likely influence COP26 negotiations.
The Landscape Institute Policy and Partnerships Manager, Scotland
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international multilateral agreement, which defines global climate action: stabilising past and present global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). In the early 1990s, the scientific assessment body for climate evidence – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published the First Assessment Report, providing the foundation for negotiating2 the UNFCCC. In 2021 nearly three decades later, as the world gets ready for COP26 in Glasgow, another landmark IPCC report3 has sounded the emergency klaxon. In August 2021, the IPCC published Part 1 of the Sixth Assessment Report. The report confidently concludes that climate change is happening now, that recordbreaking weather events (such as heat waves, floods, and wildfires) are already occurring across the globe, and without ‘immediate, rapid, and largescale reductions’ in GHG emissions, global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will
COP takes place every year, with this year’s being the 26th meeting. COP26 summit themes: • clean energy; • clean transport; • nature-based solutions; • adaptation and finance.
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be exceeded. COP26 (the 26th meeting of the COP) in November is therefore a watershed moment, which will determine the scale of action to limit global warming in the next decade. This puts particular attention on the UK’s emission reduction commitments
as the host to COP26, and on its broader environmental targets, including how resilient the UK is to the impacts of climate change.
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