COP is the acronym for "Conference of the Parties". These are high-level conferences organised by the United Nations that bring together states, regional organisations and non-state actors. Any meeting between parties to a convention is officially a COP, although the acronym is often used in reference to environmental negotiations and, in particular, climate change.
They serve as the formal meeting of the UNFCCC parties (Conference of the Parties, COP) to negotiate and agree action on how to tackle climate change, limit emissions and halt global warming. The United Nations Climate Change Conferences are the world's highest decision-making body on climate issues and one of the largest international meetings in the world.
The importance of these international meetings in the climate agenda is based on their potential to establish negotiations that define measures to contain the climate crisis on a global scale.
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was a major meeting on sustainable development that identified three natural processes at high risk: desertification, biodiversity loss and climate change.
Since then, three conventions have been created, each focused on addressing and eradicating each of these environmental impacts, although the best known is the climate change convention, both because of the scale of the problem it represents and the need to accelerate action by governments and businesses to address it.
The name of the COPs is made up of the acronym and a number, which reflects the edition of the COP, for example, COP 27. As the frequency of the COPs varies according to the type of summit, the numbering varies even if they are held in the same year. That is, COP 27 on climate change was held in 2022, but so was COP 15 on biodiversity and COP 15 on desertification, even though they have a different number.
