What is COP27?

Conference of the Parties

COP27 is the United Nations’s (UN) 27th Climate Change Conference of the Parties. COP27 will build upon the outcomes of COP26 in order to tackle the climate emergency.

With the world experiencing record concentrations of greenhouse gasses, increasingly extreme weather events and an ever-growing energy crisis, COP27 will crucially work on accelerating action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

When is COP27 taking place?

COP27 is being held on the 6 November 2022 through to 18 November 2022. We will be exploring it's themes and providing content throughout COP27.

Where is COP27 being held?

This year's COP is being held in Egypt in Sharm El Sheikh, the so called 'Green City'.

The basics

What is sustainability?

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.

Burning fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blank wrapped around the earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures.

Carbon neutral or carbon neutrality is the balance between emitting carbon and absorbing carbon emissions from sinks, or simply eliminating all carbon emissions altogether.

Carbon sinks are any systems that absorb more carbon than they emit, such as forests, soils and oceans.

Carbon neutral refers to balancing out the total amount of carbon emissions. Net Zero carbon means no carbon was emitted in the beginning. Net Zero describes the point in time where humans stop adding to the burden of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere.

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Introducing: Our new Student Officers for Sustainability
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Significance of COP

Why does COP27 matter?

The planet is heating up to dangerously high levels which will cause devastation for everyone and everything on the earth. Action is needed to mitigate the effects of climate change and, for this to have an impact, this needs to be a global collaboration.

COP27 is bringing together governments and organisations from across the world together to encourage key decision-makers to take action to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Each and every one of us can do our bit to make a difference but, ultimately, it’s in the hands of the most powerful to drive wide-ranging, structural changes which can have a significant impact on the world’s emissions. This is why COP27 is so important to facilitate such discussions.

“Without doubt, extreme weather events, amplified by global warming, are coming faster than predicted and are more severe than predicted. The impacts are there to see: the disastrous floods in Pakistan; the failure of the rainy season in Somalia for the past four years; and highly destructive wildfires in California.”

Johan Rockström
Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany

Climate catastrophe

Facts and statistics

Global temperature

0.87°C

since 1880

Ice lost

28 tr

tonnes between 1994-2017

Sea level rise

3.4

mm per year between 1993-2017