Hello Kids!

Would you like to know a little bit more about “COP”? If so, read on!

“COP” stands for “Conference of Parties”. But it’s not a party at all! It is a huge meeting of the people who run all the countries of the world and they meet so they can agree on how to stop climate change happening to protect nature and people. For two weeks there are LOADS of meetings in LOTS of different rooms!

The people come from all over the world and this year (COP 29) they came to Baku, a city in Azerbaijan.

You can see the country’s flag above. Baku is a very old city but also has lots of very modern buildings.

This one is in the shape of a pomegranate because the people of Azerbaijan love pomegranates and they make delicious juice from it which is sold everywhere.

Baku is by the sea but for over a hundred years the city has been used to drill and refine oil and gas for people’s heating and for factories. The trouble is that we know nowadays that using “fossil fuels” (burning oil, gas and coal) is VERY bad for the environment and is making the climate change in a way that is not good for people or nature.

At the COP last year (COP 28) the countries agreed that we must gradually stop using fossil fuels. But this year some of them are arguing against that. One of these people is President-elect Trump in America (he will be President in January).

Lots of people from countries a long way away from the UK attend COP and many of these people have been badly affected by climate change. They have had lot of floods and heatwaves and some of their houses and schools have been destroyed.

These young people had a protest at COP to ask the richer countries like ours to pay more money to help their countries to cope with climate change and to spend money on things like wind turbines and solar panels so that we stop using fossil fuels.

This is a huge bill for the amount of money the rich countries should pay the poorer ones to make it fair. I’m sure you have never seen a receipt this long when you go to the supermarket!

The people on this picture all live in places where their families have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. Some live in the rainforests of South America. They are very good at looking after nature because they have always done that but they get very upset and angry because their forests keep being chopped down by people who want to make money from the wood and the land.

One day at COP there was a long “human chain” of people who were all asking the governents to be kinder to the people from the forests and the people from the countries who have so many floods and heatwaves. They need more money to live and they need the people in the meetings to listen to them about how to look after nature properly.

The problem was that the people who organise the meetings didn’t want the people in the human chain to make any noise so they all had to stand in a line silently, like you do when you line up to go into your school lessons!

Some of the people in the meetings do stop and talk to the people and are quite friendly. One of these was Ed Miliband who is in charge of climate change for the government here in the UK- I bumped into him one day.

This is a picture of me with Ed in the middle. You might have guessed by now that I am a teacher in the UK. Tony, who is standing on the other side of Ed works in the National Health Service. We were in COP asking the countries to make sure they look after teachers and teaching assistants and nurses and doctors because we think these are important jobs!

It’s really good to be at COP and meet people from different countries to find out more about each other. This is me talking to Darren from Uganda, who also works with children and teaches them about climate change.

COP can be fun too! But the thing that everybody learns from COP is that the world would be a better place if we were all a little kinder to each other and kinder to nature too.