COP27 Term Descriptions
Conference of the Parties or COP
On climate change, the Conference of Parties (COP) is the supreme decision-making forum of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), bringing signatory governments together once a year to discuss and agree how to jointly address climate change and its impacts. The ‘parties’ of the COP are the governments which have signed the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreement. World leaders, ministers, negotiators, civil society, businesses, international organizations and the media all attend. Work to reach agreement takes place mainly among negotiators, which include ministers, with ‘observer’ organizations attending to bring transparency, as well as broader perspectives, to the process.
The Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement is the first legally-binding global treaty on climate change agreed in COP21 in Paris in 2015. Since 2015, under the Paris Agreement, almost all countries in the world have committed to:
Keep the rise in global average temperature to ‘well below’ 2°C, and ideally 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels.
Strengthen the ability to adapt to climate change and build resilience.
Align finance flows with ‘a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development’.
The Paris Agreement has a ‘bottom-up’ approach where countries individually decide by how much they will reduce their national emissions each year.
They communicate these targets to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) secretariat in the form of ‘nationally determined contributions’, or ‘NDCs’, which they have agreed to revise every five years. This five-year cycle of increasing ambition is known as the ‘ratchet mechanism’.
COP26 in Glasgow was the first test of this mechanism, having been delayed from 2020 to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The planned emissions cuts outlined in NDCs submitted at, or before, Glasgow were insufficient to limit global warming to the agreed levels. COP26 ended with a call for countries to put forward revised NDCs within the year at, or before, COP27 thereby adding another ‘tooth’ to the ratchet mechanism ahead of the next agreed revision in 2025.