What is COP? Why the climate summit matters to you

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP):

The United Nations climate summit, known as COP26 this year, brings officials from almost 200 countries to Glasgow to haggle over the best measures to combat global warming.

Here are some of the terms and key issues that will be discussed at the event, which started on Sunday and is scheduled to run to November 13.

COP

Short for Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

First held in 1995, it also serves as the meeting of parties to the 1992 Kyoto Protocol that first committed countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and those that signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Governments meeting in the French capital six years ago agreed on a target of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), ideally no more than 1.5C (2.7F), by the end of this century compared with pre-industrial times.

HIGH-LEVEL SEGMENT

More than 100 world leaders, including Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, will attend the start of the summit on Monday and Tuesday, known as the high-level segment, including United States President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

NDCs

The Paris accord set a target for limiting global warming but left it up to each country to submit its own emissions reduction targets, known as Nationally Determined Contributions.

Part of the plan was for countries to regularly review and, if necessary, update their targets to ensure that the Paris goal is met.

Governments were required to submit their new NDCs five years after Paris, but that deadline was quietly pushed back a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

PARIS RULEBOOK

Countries had hoped to finalise the so-called Paris rulebook a few years after the accord was signed, but some elements of the agreement remain unfinished.

They include how countries collect and report their greenhouse gas emissions in a transparent way and how to regulate global carbon markets.

CLIMATE FINANCE

Among the top issues at COP26 is the question of how poor countries will afford the expense of ditching cheap fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy while adapting to the inevitable effects of global warming already baked into the atmosphere.

SEE STORIES ON A2 AND B13.