What has COP achieved?

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There's never been a day in human history when so many national leaders have come together in a single place. United Nations have called a conference to talk about the state of the environment. So here was a tremendous opportunity and an opportunity to do international environmental cooperation, where it's much more serious about engaging the developing countries. So that was a lot of enthusiasm around that. And out of the Earth Summit, emerges COP. Conference of the parties. And its aim is to stop climate change. Fast forward to today and COP 28, the 20th world climate conference, is about to start in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. What has COP achieved over the last three decades? That's our climate question. From the BBC World Service, I'm Jordan Dunbar. And I'm Greer Jackson. I've been speaking to a lot of people, asking them a simple question. What is COP? And everyone I've asked has given a different answer, which is a bit of a problem. A massive headache. I mean, we've sort of alluded to the fact that it's a conference to fight climate change, but let's drill into the nitty-gritty. OK, so COP's happened every year in a different country. The overall point of these COP's is to come to an agreement on how to limit climate change. And by that, you mean reducing planet warming gases, being pumped into the sky, and they're mainly created by burning coal, oil and natural gas. Exactly. So a global consensus, I everyone has to agree to it and sign up. OK, then. We know what COP is. But what has COP actually achieved since Rio three decades ago? OK, Greer, let's step into the climate hall of FIM. There are two agreements I want to tell you about. Let me present the Kyoto Protocol. The Sunsexy. Yes, this came from the third COP this time in Japan. It was 1997, and for the first time, countries agreed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Yay, that sounds like a climate win. Yeah, unfortunately, it was mostly symbolic. As the United States, Canada and Russia didn't sign up. OK, so the world's biggest polluters then? Yeah, big emitters, but it was a symbol that action could happen, although it didn't actually slow global warming. Jordan, I hate to tell you this, but this whole paper's rubbish. Hold on. That symbol of Kyoto eventually helped lead to the Paris Agreement in 2015 at COP21. This did have all the major polluters sign up. 192 countries agreed to limit emissions and global warming to well under two degrees. The biggest show of global consensus to date. We can look into the eyes of our children, our grandchildren, and we can finally say, tell them that we have joined the hands to pick with a more habitable world. Those big agreements are not the only successes to have come out of COP, says David Victor. He's professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, in the United States of America. And he spent a long time thinking, researching, and writing books about COP. What COP has achieved really always has been to put a focus on climate at least once a year, these are annual events. And so that attention focusing part of COP has been incredibly important. And I'm also interested in the fact that actually in some ways, COP isn't just about the agreement itself. Lots of sort of side deals and deals between individual countries also come out of COP. I'm thinking about the pack to ND for a station by 2030, by some rainforest nations. I'm thinking about the just energy partnerships, where rich countries are paying, developing countries to help them transition away from from coal in particular, but fossil fuels more broadly. Yeah, I think the side events have now become bigger than the main intergovernmental event. And frankly, the side events are a much more important part of COP, because they're where commitments by actors other than governments get made in order to stop emissions that cause climate change. It's made COP a success. It's also made COP a noisier process, because there are all kinds of other things that are happening on the side. Last year was my first visit to COP in Sharmelshik, Egypt. And it felt like a mixture of a climate festival, science gathering, business convention, media circus, and it even had actual parties. So that's a video of a party with a man and a dinosaur suit called Frankie, dancing around a pool with a sign saying don't choose extinction. Of course, there's a man and a dinosaur suit. Of course, Frankie's there. And another night I took a wrong turn at a fancy hotel, and I ended up a really swanky drinks reception for a wind turbine company, and they had an arbitrary band. Shouldn't it sound like you're on holiday? Sounds like you're having a great time. I was having a great time at that until security escorted me out. Yeah. What I will say is this all sounds a lot livelier than what I'd expect from a climate conference. That's because it's become almost cool to attend night. We're going to have over 70,000 people at COP 20 hit politicians, negotiators, climate scientists, business people from both green and fossil fuel industries, activists, and even celebrities. Yeah, I read about my childhood crush, Lee and I did a capyote attending, and my modern day crush, Emma Watson. They've all gone to COP. So, to summarise what COP has achieved, it's had an agreement to limit global warming, ideally to 1.5 degrees. Though admittedly, we're on track for 2.5 degrees Celsius. The side events bring lots of different people together who care about taking action and try new ways to fight climate change. And there's the fact that people like us, journalists, but also politicians, we're all highly focused on the issue of climate. Yeah, so it pushes climate change into the limelight more than any other event. But for such a big problem, it really doesn't feel like much, does it? And I'm sort of now understanding why your hall of fame was really rubbish, Jordan. Great, it was free entry. Look, seriously, let's have a look at why it hasn't achieved as much as some had hoped it would. Part of the success, the festival, may also be holding it back according to Adele Najim, a professor of international relations on environment. He's originally from Pakistan and is now at Boston University's party school in the United States. You know, it's become a festival. And that's a good thing. You know, what we, in my part of the world, call a Meila, a big festival. Every comes together. That has a purpose. And I don't want to sound negative in this because I'm not. I'm a friend of the COP. But the result has been that the negotiation side, which is the real purpose of the COP conference of the parties, in many ways becomes much less important than it ought to be. It becomes a place to project your views rather than that difficult, tedious job of coming up with a treaty, coming up with difficult legal text that can become a meaningful platform for action. So in the one hand, it's great because it raises awareness throughout lots of people who might not think about climate change and brings lots of people together. Talk about climate change. But what it's not delivering on is the original concept, which was to get agreement. Yeah, right. I would certainly say so partly it hasn't worked because the issue is really complex where we started. It is everything. It impacts everything. It impacts economies. It impacts security. It impacts food. It impacts health. Right. Even as a political issue, it is difficult because it immediately becomes an issue of justice. Because some people, myself, emit far more than other people. For example, my brother who lives in Pakistan, right? And the impacts happen on both and sometimes happen even more on those who are not doing the emitting. So not everyone is affected equally or emitting equally. Which is why trying to get global consensus with 192 countries is so tough. Imagine trying to get 192 people to decide to eat in the same restaurant for dinner. Impossible. It's actually way harder than that, Jordan, if you think about it. It's getting everyone to the same restaurant, yes, but to eat the same meal. And that means you've got cater for various allergies, intolerances, vegetarianism, veganism, and everyone then has to agree that the dish was delicious at the end. I would hit to have to try and plong that meal. Yeah, ditto. For such a complex issue with such a diversity of wants and needs, do we expect too much from cop? Well, yes, says David Victor. And that's why offering a side menu of agreements is more palatable and more effective in the fight against climate change. And that's actually working really well. It's why the cop process overall is starting to really have an impact on global emissions. But the fact is is that emissions are still going up and up. That leads many to say that actually the whole thing is a big fat failure. What's your view on that? My view is that they're wrong. The metrics for success have been set up to make it look like a failure. But the right way to measure progress is to compare where we are to where we would have been. So about 15 years ago the world was on track to maybe four or five degrees centigrade of warming above pre-industrial levels. Right now we're on track for maybe two and a half degrees. So two and a half is not two that looks like failure. But two and a half is not five. It's much, much lower than five. And that I think is the right way to measure progress. Are we doing enough? Absolutely not. Should we start with a better framework 30 years ago? Absolutely, but we didn't. And so now we are where we are. And where we are isn't terrible in that context. Cop has nearly halved the amount of global warming. Yeah, it's not nothing. So whilst the measure of progress is wrong, it's still too slow, as David says. And there's another problem. When cop is attended by thousands of people. Remember, cop 28 is expecting 70,000 people and they could be the biggest one yet. Yeah, it inevitably drives up the cost of flights, of hotels, making it unaffordable to those most vulnerable to climate change, people from less economically developed countries. Like Zambia, where Dr. Masunda Mumba was born, Masunda has been working on environmental issues with the United Nations for decades. And now it's a secretary general of the wetlands convention. It is not a cheap venture. It's expensive. The really vulnerable people cannot even afford to get a plane ticket to go. When the cop was happening in Shamal Shake, all those businesses, all those hotels just spike the prices of the hotel rooms. I mean, it's ridiculous. No government is going to pay for a hotel room for $500 a day for you. No, not at all. Do you think cop has achieved bringing in the global south to these negotiations? It has, but it could do more. The European Union negotiates as a block, right? They negotiate as 27 countries. They come in with about 10 negotiators just for the European Union. A country like, you know, seashells, Samoa, Mauritius, we'll come with one negotiator. So then you're thinking, okay, there's a negotiation process on agriculture over there. There's an negotiation process on loss and damage over there. There's another negotiation process all happening in parallel at the same day. How do I split myself? Where do I commit to be? Which room shall I be in? So already there is an equal dynamic right there. If you're not in that room, your voice is not at the table. So how do we make sure that this is an equal footing? And it is not an equal representation there. So to continue our dinner analogy, you pick an affordable restaurant with cheap transport connections so everyone can come and solve this giant puzzle. Adelna Jam says you don't want to get too comfortable. We've actually become somewhat comfortable in these scots. We start planning the next one even before the current one has happened. This encourages picking the can down the road, meaning that it's always easy to say, yes, this is very important. Let us put it on the agenda for the next meeting. Right? This is a bane of modern life. We saw that happening with loss and damage funds. Last cop, for example, it can become a self-perpetuating dinner party where you just plan the next restaurant trip and never actually solves the thing you were meeting to solve in the first place. Yeah. And as Adelna says, climate finance has been a biggie for at least a decade. Here's Macinda. Countries in Europe, North America, and other richer countries made a commitment. So we're going to give you $100 billion to try and solve this issue. We're going to give this to the least developed countries. So the least developed countries then come to the table and say, okay, colleagues, we had a discussion. We had an agreement. What's happening? What's going on? Where are we on here? Because look at what's happening in the Sahel. Look at what happening in the Pacific Island states in Samoa, Fiji, Tuvalu. And so then people are asking, you know, what exactly are we doing here? Are you know, is this a joke? And the developing countries are understandably really, really irritated by the failure to deliver that promise earlier. I guess a part of that, though, is that trust in the process, trust between nations is severely eroded as well, right? Yeah, I think this is one of the areas where the cop process has a lot of risks. The cop process is not seen by most countries as a legitimate process, it overall is going to fail. And that's going to be a risk this year at COP28. The stakes are really high for this COP28. It needs to rebuild trust and to do that, it needs to encourage more finance from rich to poorer countries, something that's been historically really hard to do. So let's just take a breath and summarize here. COP has failed to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius because, well, it's a really complex problem and it touches and influences every aspect of our lives. Also, it's working under a model that requires global consensus for too many things. Just like our restaurant analogy, that's going to be impossible to get for some issues. And that's why in part, climate finance has been so hard to agree on. But fear not, let's remember that the festival side of COP is bringing hope. Thank you, Frankie the dinosaur. I hope you're getting ready for COP28. It's funny because I was talking to David about possible solutions for COP and something he said made me wonder whether fancy dress could overcome some of these trickier dynamics. At COP26 in Glasgow, I was standing in line to go into a diplomatic negotiation, listen in, see what's going on. Next to me was a guy dressed like a banana. And I said, you know, this doesn't happen every day. Do tell me, sir, why are you dressed as a banana? And he was there as part of a youth movement in favor of nuclear power. And he was making the point that there's a lot of potassium and radio nuclides in bananas. More in bananas than there is from living near a nuclear plant. And that was hopefully getting people to feel comfortable around nuclear plants. Have you ever been interested in dressing up as something when you're at COP? Well, no, Halloween I do, but they don't hold COP and Halloween. I think a COP you go dressed in boring clothes and you hopefully do not boring things. Certainly do some good things for reporting around people, I think. You know, if you can laugh at someone you're arguing with, if you're arguing with like a burger, you know, exactly right? You came dressed as a burger and here I am. I'm a broccoli. Broccoli aside, there are some simple improvements Adele would like to put forward for the COP process. I think the cops should decide that we are going to stop the cops at COP 30, 32, whatever it is. Give yourself a deadline. I think that may not be a bad idea. You know, I mean, I'm joking here, but partly I do join for a more old-fashioned negotiation style, which was get the negotiators, put them in a hotel, put them in a ship, whatever, and say your job is to negotiate your countries have given you the brief. Now work at it until you get it done. The other thing David talked about was creating policy that everyone can agree on. And surprisingly, you do this by shifting the focus away from climate change. Well, in most of the world, most people are not centrally concerned with climate change. They're also worried about a lot of other things, like warmth and cooking. And so in most of the world, we're going to be making progress by linking climate to other things that people care a lot more about, like air pollution. There's a tremendous opportunity for progress and controlling such. So it is a number one air pollution killer in the world. It's caused not only by coal plants, but also by traditional firewood stoves and cooking techniques that are used all around the developing countries. And so if there are ways to improve that, that also reduce soda emissions that has an immediate benefit in terms of local health, and also has a huge benefit to the climate. So does one of the major contributors to causing climate change. Working on a problem like soot is an example of how we can link concerns about a climate change to public health. means we're going to have strategies that are politically more durable, more viable. That's not David's only tip for getting effort to sign up. These agreements need to be flexible so they can accommodate everyone's different needs. And we've done this before. Take the ozone layer. Way back in 1987 when the first major agreement was signed on the ozone layer, no one even knew what was really causing the hole in the ozone layer at the time. Over time, we learned and we also ran a lot of experiments. Now, it happens that in that case, most of the experiments produced fruit much earlier than people expected. So we could ratchet the commitments tighter. Sometimes it was harder and we loosened the commitments. And that process of experimentation, learning and adjustment, that explains why the ozone accords are the most successful international environmental agreements of all time. Same is true for acid rain. Acid rain in Europe, very successful. How do we solve that problem? We solve that problem because some countries and firms were highly motivated to do something about that problem, especially revolving around Germany, which was affected very, very heavily by acid rain. And so those firms went out and did more. And they tested new technologies, scrubber technologies, moving away from traditional coal and so on. And those experiments eventually bore fruit. And then we could really ratchet the commitments tighter and use the European Union to ratchet the commitments tighter on all countries that were causing the pollution. And that's the process. That's broadly what's happening to the Paris Agreement. And that's why I think we should be encouraged. The climate problem is a harder problem to solve than those, but it's not different. It's the same basic structure where you have firms and governments that need to be motivated to act. They don't know what to do. And so they need to be motivated to go run experiments and learn into a trust. And that process is now beginning. These targets allow countries to try things out. Some will fail, but some will work. And those wins can then be shared with other countries and help us keep making progress. What will you be looking out for at COP 20-IT, other than hoping that we don't have COP 60-IT? There are three types of things. I mean, one on the process itself, I hope focus and priority on the policy negotiation side. I would hope this happens at least around two issues that have really become salient. One is the loss and damage fund, which became a big thing in the last COP, but was not decided and is on the agenda this time. And the second is a real movement towards a world without fossil fuels. But those are the type of issues that are really sort of substantively the big things. The other thing I'm really looking forward to at COP is evidence of industry doing things. The theory of change that the Emirati's offered the world in hosting COP, and in having the head of AdNoc, the national oil company as president of COP, is that here are companies that are really, really important for cutting emissions in the future, and they're doing a lot of stuff. I really want to see a lot of evidence of what they're doing, and what the plan looks like and the evidence of experimentation. There actually is quite a lot of evidence, but they need to make that case to the world so the world sees that there's really a benefit from engaging these kinds of firms. Having the head of AdNoc, Sultan Al-Jaba, as COP's president has been a controversial appointment, we're going to be looking at this next week on the show, so make sure you subscribe, like, follow, wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss it. And if you've any questions about this year's COP and what I hope to achieve, please get in touch. The climate question at BBC.com will be hoping to address them in the coming weeks. For all its drawbacks and frustrations, COP is still unique. It's the only climate conference of its kind, and the one time a year climate change really gets the spotlight both for the public on for politicians. Listen to Saul first hand the power of having the climate community in one room hearing one message. I'll tell you what, at COP25 in Madrid, I moderated a session with the Secretary-General Antonio Buterrish, and he says, "Musanda, just wait a minute, we're just about to be joined by Luca Primitano." Station, this is Houston, are you ready for the event? Houston, this is Luca, I'm ready for the event. This is Mission Control Houston, please constation for voice check. And the screens went on and Luca Primitano of the European Space Agency streamed in live. And it was so emotional, it was emotive. And he's describing how he's in the space shuttle, he's going across the planet. It is something really hard to describe in terms of what we feel and how it makes you feel. I can tell you that our planet is incredibly beautiful. And I'll give you an example of why. The mesosphere clouds which are very high in the atmosphere, when the light hits them right, they turn into this amazing blue color that I have never seen anywhere else. And it's the color of thousands of years of evolution of our planet. We also see its incredible fragility. Our planet is our only one and it's the only place that can give us hope and can give us life. And that visualization also brings the story home because I don't care how much investment we're going to invest in Mars. I'm sorry, Mars doesn't have water, it doesn't have chocolate, it doesn't have life. And yet this very planet that we call home is getting destroyed very fast. So we need this element of inclusivity, everybody, everybody who's, you know, an earthling has to be at that table in equal measure. And only at cop. Only at cop could he speak to the entire world, the polluters and the victims of climate change all at once for that image, only at cop, right? Only at cop. Only at that event. Now Jordan Dunbar deserves huge kudos for producing and presenting this program which I can assure you is no mean feat. Jordan has also been making special podcast only guides on topics like what is climate change, why is 1.5 degrees Celsius important and what is cop, which hopefully you now understand. But if you don't, do check out Jordan's podcasts. They're funny, fabulous, and factual to search for the climate question wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you to Sherook, Elkobross and Boris Sedate for their help in researching the program. Alex Lewis is our series producer and China Collins is our editor. Tom Brignel is our clever creative on the mixing test. Food is incredibly important in the world. It's about survival, culinary heritage, culture and tradition. Different relationships across the world. The food chain from the BBC World Service examines the business, science and cultural significance of food. If this kind of food is lost, our community will lose its identity. And what it takes to put food on your plate? This is an incredible journey. Search for the food chain wherever you get your BBC podcast. Winning never sounded so good. What would you do if you won big? At Crown Coins Casino, real people win real prizes every single day. Hi, this is Michael from Dallas and I won 40K and finally renovated my home. 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