COP24: Who Are These UN Climate Meetings For?

At the People’s Climate March rally in New York City, Sept. 21 2014. Photo credit: Alejandro Alvarez/CC 4.0

Source: New Internationalist

The latest climate negotiations have just begun – COP (Conference of the Parties) 24, the most major conference since the Paris Agreement three years ago.

While the focus of this conference, opened Sunday, is somewhat technical – a lot of talk is planned about the ‘rulebook’, i.e. how the UN climate agreement is implemented – it is important to whether the Paris Agreement amounts to more than warm words.

2018 has seen saw record temperatures around the world, abnormal rain and floods in South Asia and East Africa, and rare tropical cyclones from Yemen to Somalia – not to speak of the recent unprecedented wildfires across California. And a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) painted a sobering picture of what would happen if the world exceeds a new target of limiting global warming to 1.5C; it also warned that staying within the limit requires ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’.