Workers Solidarity Movement

Thousands of people have converged on Bonn, Germany, for COP23, the annual United Nations summit on climate change. What is COP 23 and why should we care?

Climate change is a global crisis like nothing humans have seen before. COP23 stands for the 23^rd ‘Conference of the Parties’, the 23^rd in a series of similar climate talks. This happens within the UNFCCC or ‘UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’ - basically the UNFCCC is a plan and legal framework to seriously deal with climate change as a global society. The UNFCCC was agreed in 1992 in Brazil and has been built upon each year. It came over 30 years after climate change was given serious international political treatment by the UN in 1961 [1]. The well-known ‘Kyoto Protocol’ was agreed in 1997 at a UNFCCC summit.