The annual Conference of Parties (COP) dates back to the Rio Earth Summit held in 1992, where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was first adopted.
That convention set the international political movement for stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in motion, with the goal to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Officially formed two years after the Rio convention in 1994, the UNFCCC now has membership of 195 parties. (cop21paris.org/about/cop21)
According to COP, its main mission is to review the implementation of the conferences’ goals. The first COP took place in Berlin in 1995. COP3 brought us the Kyoto Protocol. The Montreal Action Plan arose out of COP11 and the Green Climate Fund was created at COP17. In December 2015, COP21, also known as the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, produced a historic agreement to combat climate change. The aim of the Paris Agreement is to keep a global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius this century and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
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