Once upon a time, many unrealised commitments ago, our unindustrialised world enjoyed relatively stable climate conditions. Today, counting aside a few fact-resistant figures such as the 45th and 47th President of the United States of America who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” there is almost global consensus that climate change is a very real, human-caused threat to our well-being and planetary health. Earth is warming and it's because we release too much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.  

When Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius had initially published his findings in 1896 that carbon dioxide can trap heat in the atmosphere, his contemporaries were not too convinced. It took 62 more years until Charles Keeling began measuring atmospheric CO2 levels at Mauna Loa, which eventually led the scientific community to recognise the causality between the consistent increase of carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. In the decades since, we have built a global economy dependent on burning fossil fuels, leading to higher carbon emissions and further adverse effects of climate change. Globally, 1.1 Billion children are now exposed to at least 3 climate hazards, and in 2024 alone 45,8 million people were internally displaced due to primarily climate-related disasters. The recent flash-flood in Nepal left 1,400 people dead and over 5,000 are still missing. These figures are merely a peek into the human cost of inaction.  

At this point, one might be tempted to wonder whether the consequences of the industrial revolution were indeed disastrous for the human race. But perhaps, unlike mathematician and terrorist Ted Kaczynski, we can take a less bomb-ful approach to solving our problems. Sure, perhaps too many board meetings have passed since we’ve found out about the greenhouse effect and we’ve chosen to maximize shareholder value rather than preserving the Earth.

Maybe we could have mobilized more of our resources towards managing environmental crises rather than utilizing astronomical military budgets to develop more innovative ways to kill each other. However, was there no genuine effort for climate action whatsoever?   There was, certainly, at least an attempt.  

In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme in order to provide decisionmakers with assessments of climate science being conducted around the world. Their first assessment report proved to be quite consequential, due to the fact that it finally recognised human-activity as the driver of climate change and recommended global action. This led to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where 198 parties adopted the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, under the mandate of which parties have been meeting annually since 1995.  

This annual meeting, the principal global platform for climate dialogue and action, is our dear Conference of the Parties. Over the last 30 years, with its strengths and flaws, COP has enabled significant albeit insufficient progress in mitigating carbon emissions and adapting to changing climate conditions by convening most governments of the world, encouraging them to make science-based decisions.  

In 1997 at COP3 the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, which was meant to acknowledge the historical emissions of already industrialised “Annex I” economies and have them commit to reducing their carbon emissions to 5% less than their 1990 levels by 2012. However, the overall benefit of this protocol so far has been limited due to the rapid industrialisation of developing economies such as China and the fact that the biggest emitter of the time USA has signed but never ratified this agreement.  

COP15 in 2009 had the misfortune of producing a non-binding pledge to build up towards 100 Billion dollars in annual climate finance from developed countries to developing countries over a 11 year time frame. For comparison, the military spending of the USA alone  in 2009 was approximately 596 billion dollars. The intent of this COP was to build greater ambition via binding targets for all parties, which has unfortunately backfired. 

COP21 of 2015 had a comparatively milder approach, proposing voluntary mechanisms for each country to set its own targets via Nationally Determined Contributions, a ratchet mechanism that was meant to improve countries’ respective NDCs every 5 years and a Global Stocktake to periodically assess collective progress. Most importantly, the Paris Agreement adopted at COP21 committed the parties to hold the global average temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, additionally pursuing efforts for a warming below 1,5 degrees Celsius. This agreement established a benchmark target for future negotiations.  

However, as reinvigorating as this commitment was for climate negotiations, our delivery continues to falter.  

We are far off track from keeping global average temperature increase to below 1,5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The current trajectory lands us near 2,8 degrees of warming by the end of the century. We have no concrete timeline to phase out fossil fuels, the primary cause of carbon emissions. The New Collective Quantified Goal’s aspirational annual climate finance figure of 1,3T dollars, meant to be achieved by 2035, is heavily reliant on unguaranteed private financing. The country with the highest historical carbon emissions is absent from COP and has recently removed emissions-caps from their coal and natural gas plants on September 14th.  

Obviously, we need to get our act together: to actually realise our ambitions, ensure the involvement of all parties, transition away from fossil fuels, and encourage developing countries to decouple their growth from emissions via technology transfer and mobilization of climate financing from able nations.  

COP31 promises to be an “implementation COP” that transforms previous commitments into action. However, Murat Kurum of Türkiye and Chris Bowen of Australia would have us believe in the genuinity of their promise while the matter of transitioning away from fossil fuels is still off-agenda.  

COP remains the most relevant platform in the world to build consensus amongst countries for climate action, but as we approach the 9th of November, it is becoming ever more clear that we shall have many elephants to address in our negotiation rooms.