Thousands of climate negotiators, non-governmental organisations, scientists, businesspeople and more are gathering in Belem in Brazil ahead of the Cop30 climate conference.
While Cop30 itself officially begins on Monday, multiple climate conferences and announcements are scheduled for this week, so the whole extravaganza will stretch to well over a fortnight.
With more than 50,000 expected in Belem, Cop30 will be a major gathering, if not quite on the scale of Cop28 in Dubai in 2023, which was attended by well in excess of 80,000.
The Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, is hosting Cop30 at a difficult time for action on climate change.
While the US president, Donald Trump, in September branded climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, the push back against climate action is not confined to the United States, which is the world’s second-biggest emitter.
Some other nations, both developed and developing – among them Brazil itself – have come in for criticism over what has been seen as the rolling back of efforts to cut emissions.
Such have the difficulties been in keeping to the 2015 Paris Agreement’s target of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels that questions have been asked about the effectiveness of the whole Cop process.
But some have argued that, without Cop, future temperature increases would have been even more severe than they are actually likely to be.
So instead of the an increase in temperatures of 2.7 °C compared to pre-industrial levels, which is what the sum of current national targets suggest could happen, the world could have been staring in the face rises of 4-5 °C, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
It is a sobering thought to keep in mind during Cop30.
How divers are giving UAE corals a helping hand in the fight against climate change
Corals have faced great pressures as a result of climate change, with bleaching events – when the corals expel the algae that they normally live in harmony with – happening at an alarming rate in the Gulf region.
But it is not all bad news, as efforts are being made to help create new areas of coral and so offset some of the impacts of climate change.
The scuba diving centre Freestyle Divers is aiming to plant thousands of corals through the Project REEFrame initiative, which the centre has been leading since 2021.
Read Alexander Christou’s fascinating article about when The National joined the divers here.
Typhoon Kalmaegi causes devastation and scores of deaths in the Philippines
Following on from the devastating effects of Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean last week, in recent days it has been the central Philippines that has borne the brunt of extreme weather in the form of Typhoon Kalmaegi.
Floods described as the worst in living memory have caused devastation in the province of Cebu, sweeping away even shipping containers and causing the death toll to exceed 100.
Only in September the Philippines suffered the effects of two major storms, one of which, Super Typhoon Ragasa, also caused more than a dozen deaths in Taiwan.
Read the full story here.
The big fact
The key aim of the Paris Agreement, forged at Cop21 in Paris in 2015, was to limit global temperature rises to no more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, which are defined as those from 1850 to 1900.
Last year average temperatures were 1.55 °C above pre-industrial levels, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, but since the 1.5 °C target refers to a long-term average rather than the results from a single year, the threshold agreed in Paris is yet to be breached, although many climate scientists feel that this is now highly likely.
Jargon buster
Cop stands for Conference of the Parties, with the parties being the almost 200 countries that are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Cop30 is so named because it is the 30th such event, although there were two Cop6s, one of them called simply Cop6 and the other Cop6-2. The first Cop took place in Bonn in 1995. Efforts are made to rotate the hosting of Cops between the UN’s five recognised regions, which are Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe and Others.
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