Today world leaders are gathering to kick off a major global summit.

A conference known as COP28 begins Thursday and will go until December 12th.

This follows a year of extreme weather events in which many climate records have been broken.

It's the UN's annual climate change conference, COP28, and our colleague Ed Ballard is watching it closely.

Every year there is a big summit where all the world's countries pretty much get together and try and

progress the rules of the international response to climate change and also come up with sort of new commitments and try and

raise the ambition for what governments are going to be doing. And what does COP stand

for?

It's the conference of the parties.

So the parties is everyone who's signed up.

And 28, presumably that means this is the 28th such convention?

This is the 28th one. Yeah, they've been doing this for a long time.

The goal of the conference is accelerated action to limit global temperature rise,

including significantly reducing emissions from fossil fuels.

But the place where the summit is happening is best known for producing those same fossil fuels.

The surprising thing on the face of it is the location. It's happening in a big oil state.

The United Arab Emirates, it's the seventh largest oil producer in the world.

So essentially everybody is being gathered in this place

which is wealth rests on fossil fuels.

While at the same time everyone there is saying, okay, we've got to stop burning these fossil fuels.

The announcement that the United Arab Emirates was going to host what sort of reaction did that generate from people?

I think the bigger part of the reaction was more than the location.

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