This year's UN Climate Conference takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh against a backdrop of worldwide extreme weather, an energy crisis fueled by the conflict in Ukraine, and scientific data reiterating that the world is not doing enough to combat carbon emissions and safeguard the future of our planet.
The Secretary-General has stated that COP27 must deliver a "down payment" on climate solutions commensurate with the magnitude of the problem; will leaders comply?
The UN News will keep you informed throughout the two-week duration of the conference, which officially begins on November 6; however, before our multimedia team departs for the shores of the Red Sea, we've compiled this guide to the most essential information.
story with all these police officers?
The COPs are the world's largest and most significant annual climate-related conferences.
In 1992, the United Nations convened the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted and its coordinating agency - the UN Climate Change secretariat - was established.
In this agreement, nations agreed to "stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere in order to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system." So far, 197 parties have signed the document.
Since 1994, when the treaty entered into force, the United Nations has convened global climate summits or "COPs," which stands for "Conference of the Parties," almost every year.
During these meetings, nations have negotiated various extensions of the original treaty to establish legally binding limits on emissions, such as the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015, in which all nations agreed to increase their efforts to try to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures and to increase climate action financing.
How does COP27 differ from previous COPs?
Last year's COP26, which marked five years since the signing of the Paris Agreement (one year was skipped due to the COVID pandemic), resulted in the Glasgow Climate Pact, which kept the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius alive, but "with a weak pulse," as the then-UK Presidency put it.
In order to make the Paris Agreement fully operational, the details for its practical implementation, also known as the Paris Rulebook, have been finalised.
At COP26, nations agreed to deliver stronger commitments this year, including updated national plans with more aggressive goals. To date, however, only 24 of 193 countries have submitted their plans to the United Nations.
In addition to numerous commitments made inside and outside the negotiation rooms regarding net-zero commitments, forest protection, and climate finance, among many other issues, Glasgow witnessed a number of commitments regarding net-zero commitments, forest protection, and climate finance.
According to the President's vision statement, the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) will focus on moving beyond negotiations and "planning for implementation" of all the made promises and commitments.
Egypt has demanded comprehensive, prompt, inclusive, and extensive action on the ground.According to experts, in addition to examining how to implement the Paris Rulebook, the conference will also include negotiations on a number of unresolved issues from the Glasgow meeting.
These issues include "loss and damage" financing so that countries on the frontlines of the crisis can deal with the consequences of climate change that exceed their ability to adapt, and the delivery of the promised $100 billion annually in adaptation finance from developed nations to low-income countries.
The negotiations will also include technical discussions, such as determining how nations should practically measure their emissions so that everyone has an equal playing field.
All of these discussions will pave the way for the first Global Stocktake at COP28 in 2023, which will evaluate the collective global progress on mitigation, adaptation, and implementation of the Paris Agreement.