Earlier this month, government members and representatives from across the world came together in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt, to take part in the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Also known as the , this year’s summit focused heavily on the responsibilities of high-income countries and the impact their economic and industrial development has had on the rest of the world.
COP events take place each year, intending to create an action plan or a consensus through which the represented nations can pledge to act against climate change. Year on year, targets are set and are subsequently reviewed annually as part of the next conference. The COP should meet every year; however, the represented parties can decide not to – regardless of this COP meetings have taken place each year since the first UN Climate Change Conference in Kyoto, in 1997 – most well-known of course for the inception of the Kyoto Protocol.
The agreements published at the end of a COP conference are generally considered as major breakthroughs, this is because they are often the result of weeks of discussions, presentations and negotiations, during which the COP nations must decide what unified action to take, always to reduce the impacts of climate change at the heart of those agreements.