COP was established as a way of monitoring the carbon emissions and progress towards Net-Zero by each country involved, and has been holding yearly gatherings since 1995. In recent years, COP has come under public scrutiny as it appears more and more to be yet another greenwashing scheme. In 2021, roughly 100,000 people came together to march in protest of the COP26 gathering held in Glasgow. Since then, COP has continued to ignore criticisms from the climate movement over allowing representatives from the oil and gas industry to attend and lobby.
COP28 was hosted in the United Arab Emirates, a country built on oil wealth, by Sultan Al-Jaber, the chair of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Al-Jaber was found not only to be preventing any meaningful progress towards the mitigation of the climate crisis, but using the committee to actively pursue $100 billion worth of fossil fuel deals.
These criticisms have been further developed by the Committee’s decision to fell tens of thousands of acres of the Amazon Rainforest in order to make way for the 50,000 attendants of COP30, to be held later this year.
Known as “The Lungs Of The Earth”, the Amazon Rainforest is one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. It contains 90-140 billion metric tonnes of carbon - the release of even a small percentage of which would vastly accelerate the rate of global heating. In the last 50 years, 17% of the rainforest has been destroyed for resource exploitation, agriculture, and transport. As a result, the Amazon Rainforest is on the precipice of a major tipping point, which would irreversibly change this landscape from a lush forest to a desert-like savannah. If this were to happen, the wider effects would be unknown but absolutely life-altering and destructive to the wider biodiversity of the planet.
We stand on the edge of irreversible change and a future ravaged by the effects of the climate crisis. With this most recent decision to push the Amazon further to the edge of that precipice, COP is proving that protecting the planet is not at the heart of its operations - preserving profit, however, is.