Have climate COPs worked?

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10. Have climate COPs worked?

At SGK-PLANET, on a scale of 1 to 10, we give the effectiveness of COPs a 6. We have made the basis of this qualification in the first place taking into account the numerical objectives set, based on the measurable results obtained.

Let’s see:

Firstly, the temperature has broken its record 17 times, in this 21st century alone, due to the increase in the greenhouse effect, due to our excessive CO2 emissions, the mega deforestation of tropical forests and the pollution of seas and oceans.

Secondly, another measurable fact is PPM, Parts Per Million of CO2 in the atmosphere, caused mainly by greenhouse gas emissions. In 1992, the year the COP was created, they were at 360 PPM. Since then they have done nothing but go up. The psychological mark of 400 PPM was broken 24 years later, in 2016, the year of COP22 Marrakech, which represented a significant increase of 11% in just a quarter of a century. Recently, in June 2022, the year of COP27, Sharm El- Sheikh, Egypt, ranked at 421. An increase of 17% since the first COP, in just three decades! Immense figures within the geological history of the Earth. To get a better idea of the severity of this, 400 PPM has not occurred on the planet for three million years.

The aforementioned demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the COPs in achieving their objectives. Now, almost three decades after COP 1, the modification of the planet’s climate and environment is very compromised, at a point close to no return or difficult to reverse.

In third place, There are other factors not so easily measurable. Among these we can name heat waves, severe droughts, acute water shortages, extensive and out-of-control forest fires for weeks, rising sea levels, mega floods, landslides, melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, catastrophic storms, pollution of soils and waters, deterioration of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, decrease in biodiversity, human migrations due to famine and thirst, consequence of climate change.

The low collection of the Green Climate Fund is another burden for the functioning of the COPs.

The Green Climate Fund, or GCF, is an entity included in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, created at the end of 2011, as a mechanism to help developing countries meet their adaptation and mitigation needs, referring to the climate change. It was designed as the main long-term financial instrument, with a view to raising US$100 billion annually starting in 2020.

Four years after collection began, US$400 billion should have already been obtained.

According to the Report of Climate Found Update, dated February 2022, the commitments confirmed by the parties (between 2014 and 2019) were US$8.3 billion. The same report indicates that disbursements for September 30, 2021, were US$4.05 billion. Both figures, both confirmed commitments and disbursements, are practically insignificant compared to the amount committed in the Paris Agreement.