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Dossiê BioTerra: COP

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Conference of the Parties (COP)  || Conferência das Partes

O que é a COP?

A COP é o órgão decisório supremo da Convenção. Todos os Estados que são  Partes da Convenção estão representados na COP, na qual revisam a implementação da Convenção e quaisquer outros instrumentos legais que a COP adote e tomem as decisões necessárias para promover a implementação efetiva da Convenção, incluindo arranjos institucionais e administrativos .

Mais informações sobre a COP

Uma tarefa fundamental para a COP é rever/reformular/ emendar as comunicações nacionais e os inventários de emissões apresentados pelas Partes. Com base nessas informações, a COP avalia os efeitos das medidas adotadas pelas Partes e o progresso alcançado na consecução do objetivo final da Convenção.

A COP reúne-se todos os anos, a menos que as Partes decidam  outra forma. A primeira reunião da COP foi realizada em Berlim, Alemanha, em março de 1995. A COP reúne-se em Bonn, sede do secretariado, a menos que uma Parte se ofereça para sediar a sessão. Assim como a presidência da COP gira entre as cinco regiões reconhecidas da ONU - isto é, África, Ásia, América Latina e Caraíbas, Europa Central e Oriental e Europa Ocidental e Outros - há uma tendência de que o local da COP também mude entre esses grupos.

Saber mais:

A brief history of the Conference of Parties (COPs)

Bureau of the COP
Information on election and membership of the bodies of the Convention

Não esqueças de visitar regularmente este espaço para manteres-te actualizado

End Plastic Pollution by 2040

GFCS -  Global Framework for Climate Services

GRID - Global Resource Information Database 

International Decade of Indigenous Languages

One Planet Network

Stand up 4 Human Rights

UN - Decade on Restoration (2021-2030)

UNFCC - Race to Resilience and Race to Zero

UN- The Ocean Decade (2021-2030)

WAD- World Atlas of Desertification

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Mais informação

• Conference of the parties
• Conférence des Parties
• Conferencia de las Partes
• Convenção-Quadro das Nações Unidas sobre a Mudança do Clima

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Donald Brown - Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?

Although there is an important role for scepticism in science, for almost 30 years some corporations have supported a disinformation campaign about climate change science.

While it may be reasonable to be somewhat sceptical about climate change models, these untruths are not based upon reasonable scepticism but outright falsification and distortions of climate change science.

These claims have included assertions that the science of climate change has been completely "debunked" and that there is no evidence of human causation of recent observed warming. There are numerous lines of evidence that point to human causation even if it is not a completely settled matter. Reasonable scepticism cannot claim that there is no evidence of causation and some other claims frequently being made by the well-financed climate change disinformation campaign, and they amount to an utter distortion of a body of evidence that the world needs to understand to protect itself from huge potential harms.

On 21 October, 2010, John Broder of the New York Times, reported that "the fossil fuel industries have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it".

According the New York Times article, the fossil fuel industry has "created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global warming studies, paid for rallies and websites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy."

Disinformation about the state of climate change science is extraordinarily – if not criminally – irresponsible, because the consensus scientific view is based upon strong evidence that climate change:

• Is already being experienced by tens of thousands in the world;
• Will be experienced in the future by millions of people from greenhouse gas emissions that have already been emitted but not yet felt due to lags in the climate system; and,
• Will increase dramatically in the future unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced from existing global emissions levels.

Threats from climate change include deaths and danger from droughts, floods, heat, storm-related damages, rising oceans, heat impacts on agriculture, loss of animals that are dependent upon for substance purposes, social disputes caused by diminishing resources, sickness from a variety of diseases, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, the inability to use property that people depend upon to conduct their life including houses or sleds in cold places, the destruction of water supplies, and the inability to live where has lived to sustain life. The very existence of some small island nations is threatened by climate change.

As long as there is any chance that climate change could create this type of destruction, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that these dangers are not yet fully proven, disinformation about the state of climate change science is extraordinarily morally reprehensible if it leads to non-action in reducing climate change's threat. In fact, how to deal with uncertainty in climate change science is an ethical issue, not only a scientific matter, because the consequences of delay could be so severe and the poorest people in the world as some of the most vulnerable.

The corporations that have funded the sowing of doubt on this issue are clearly doing this because they see greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategies as adversely affecting their financial interests.

This might be understood as a new type of crime against humanity. Scepticism in science is not bad, but sceptics must play by the rules of science including publishing their conclusions in peer-reviewed scientific journals and not make claims that are not substantiated by the peer-reviewed literature. The need for responsible scepticism is particularly urgent if misinformation from sceptics could lead to great harm.

We may not have a word for this type of crime yet, but the international community should find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity.

Donald Brown 

Donald Brown - An Ethical Analysis of the Cancun Climate Negotiations Outcome

The Cancun Agreements of the 2010 UN Climate Summit do not represent a success for multilateralism; neither do they put the world on a safe climate pathway that science demands, and far less to a just and equitable transition towards a sustainable model of development. They represent a victory for big polluters and Northern elites that wish to continue with business-as-usual. (IBON, 2010)

fonte:Rock Ethics Institute 

Climate change is an ethical problem because: (a) it is a problem caused by some people in one part of the world that puts people and the natural resources on which they depend in other parts of the world at great risk, (b) the harms to these other people are not mere inconveniences but in some cases catastrophic losses of life or the ability to sustain life, and (c) those who are vulnerable to climate change cant petition their government to act to protect themselves but must rely upon a sense of justice and responsibility of those causing the problem. Because climate change raises civilization challenging ethical questions, any proposed climate change regime must be examined through an ethical lens.

This post reviews the Cancun outcome through an ethical lens in light of the overall responsibility of those nations who are exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions in regard to their duties: (a) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to levels necessary to prevent harm to others, (b) to reduce greenhouse gas emission to levels consistent with what is each nation's fair share of total global emissions, and (c) to provide financing for adaptation measures and other necessary responses to climate change harms by those who are most vulnerable and least responsible for climate change.

To understand the significance of what happened in Cancun, it is necessary to briefly review the history of international negotiations leading up to Cancun. That is, it is not sufficient to simply examine what happened in Cancun without seeing Cancun in the context of twenty-year negotiating history that had as its goal the prevention of dangerous climate change and the harms that each year of delay in agreeing to a global deal exacerbate.

II. The Path To The Cancun Agreement

The Cancun conference took place from November 29 to December 10, 2010. The Cancun goals were modest in light of the failure of COP-15 in Copenhagen the year before to achieve an expected global solution to climate change. Copenhagen was expected to produce a global solution to climate change pursuant to a two-year negotiating process that was agreed to in Bali, Indonesia, two years before Copenhagen in December 2007.

To understand the ethical significance of the Cancun, it is necessary to review the twenty-year history of climate change negotiations that led to Copenhagen and Cancun. This history constitutes a mostly failed attempt over two decades to adopt a global solution to climate change.

Negotiations on a global climate change deal began in 1990 that led in 1992 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (Bodansky,2001) The negotiation process began in December 1990, when the UN General Assembly established the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change, to negotiate a convention containing "appropriate commitments" in time for signature in June 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. This treaty itself did not contain binding greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions limitations for countries but nevertheless included numerous other binding national obligations. Among other things, for instance, the parties to the UNFCCC agreed that:

(a) They would adopt policies and measures to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system; (b) Developed countries should take the first steps to do this; (c) Nations have common but differentiated responsibilities to prevent climate change; (d) Nations may not use scientific uncertainty as an excuse for not taking action; and, (e) Nations should reduce their ghg emissions based upon "equity." (UN, 1992)

In the early UNFCCC negotiations, the European Union and Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) advocated establishing a target and timetable to limit emissions by developed countries in the UNFCCC, while the United States and the oil-producing states opposed this idea. (Bodanksy, 2001). Other developing states generally supported targets and timetables, as long as it was clearly understood that these targets and timetables would apply only to developed states. (Bodanksy, 2001)

The UNFCCC has 192 parties, a number that includes almost all countries in the world including the United States which ratified the UNFCCC in 1993.

The UNFCC is a "framework" convention because it has always been expected that additional requirements would be added to the initial framework in updates that are known as "protocols" or in annual decisions of the conferences of the parties (COPs).

Each year as the parties to the UNFCCC meet in COPs , decisions were made that affect the responsibilities of the parties. The UNFCCC COPs were as follows:

• 1995 - COP 1, The Berlin Mandate

• 1996 - COP 2, Geneva, Switzerland

• 1997 - COP 3, The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change

• 1998 - COP 4, Buenos Aires, Argentina

• 1999 - COP 5, Bonn, Germany

• 2000 - COP 6, The Hague, Netherlands

• 2001 - COP 6 (Continued), Bonn, Germany

• 2001 - COP 7, Marrakech, Morocco

• 2002 - COP 8, New Delhi, India

• 2003 - COP 9, Milan, Italy

• 2004 - COP 10, Buenos Aires, Argentina

• 2005 - COP 11 Montreal, Canada

• 2006 - COP 12, Nairobi, Kenya

• 2007 - COP 13 Bali, Indonesia

• 2008 - COP 14, Poznań, Poland

• 2009 - COP 15, Copenhagen, Denmark

• 2010 - COP-16, Cancun.

Each year nations have meet in COPs to achieve a global solution to climate change and each COP for the most part continued to add small steps toward the goals of the UNFCCC. Yet in all COPs some nations have resisted calls from some of the most vulnerable nations to adopt a solution to climate change that would prevent dangerous climate change.

As the international community approached Cancun, no comprehensive global solution had been agreed to despite the fact that the original negotiations on the UNFCCC began in 1990 with a goal of achieving a global climate change solution. For this reason, Cancun must be understood as the latest attempt in a twenty year history of mostly failed attempts to structure a global solution to climate change.

COP4 – Buenos Aires, Argentina (novembro de 1998)

A quarta Sessão da Conferência das Partes serviu para aumentar os esforços de implementação da Convenção e se preparar para a entrada em vigor do Protocolo de Quioto. Com essa perspectiva, foi elaborado o pacote de metas que ficou conhecido como o Plano de ação de Buenos Aires.

O referido Plano de Trabalho determinou uma data-limite, o ano de 2000 (COP6), para que fossem colocadas em prática as principais regras e questões técnicas e políticas, bem como os impasses respectivos à implantação do Protocolo de Quioto. Esse programa possibilitaria ao Brasil obter financiamento externo visando o desenvolvi
mento de projetos no âmbito do MDL. Foi ratificada a necessidade de se considerar as atuais emissões de poluentes e introduzido o conceito de responsabilidade histórica das emissões.

O Plano de Ação de Buenos Aires tratou separadamente dos seguintes temas: i) Mecanismos de financiamento; ii) Desenvolvimento e transferência de tecnologias; iii) Implementação dos artigos 4.8 e 4.9 da Convenção; iv) Atividades implementadas conjuntamente em fase piloto; v) Programa de trabalho dos mecanismos do Protocolo de Quioto; vi) Preparação para a primeira Conferência das Partes servindo ao Protocolo de Quioto, incluindo o desenvolvimento dos elementos do Protocolo relacionados à complacência e políticas e medidas, voltados à mitigação da mudança climática.

Saiba mais sobre a COP4

• Página Oficial COP4 – UNFCCC
• EARTH NEGOTIATIONS BULLETIN: COP4 Final. Report of the Fourth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: 2-13 November 1998. IISD, v. 12, N° 97, Monday, 16 Nov. 1998.