It’s COP season again. COP30 – or to give it its full title, the 30th Conference of the Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – gets underway imminently.
Dimly we might recall COP26 hitting headlines in the UK four years ago when Glasgow hosted it. Boris Johnson’s one minute to midnight speech, perhaps? Maybe “keeping 1.5 alive”? Or Alok Sharma’s tears when India pulled the rug on his deal to phase out coal?
For all that it didn’t achieve everything it hoped for, the Glasgow COP was the last one to make a significant difference. Since then COPs 27, 28 and 29 in Egypt, Azerbaijan and UAE have come and gone. So, what can we expect from Brazil’s COP30? Apart from a flurry of articles on the carbon footprint of all those flights, Brazil’s new highway through the rainforest and/or some earnest handwringing on the urgent need for international leaders to step up. Honestly, I don’t know.
