It will be the city of Katowice, in Poland, that will host Cop 24, the next United Nations world climate conference, which will take place from 3 to 14 December 2018. For all those who care about the environment, it will in some ways be an "away fixture": the Warsaw government has shown, on more than one occasion, that it does not regard the environment as a priority. Moreover, for the second consecutive year, the summit will be hosted by a nation that still relies heavily on coal for energy production, despite it being the fossil fuel most damaging to the global climate balance.

A coal mine in Poland in a photograph from 1978 ©Keystone/Getty Images

The fate of the world depends on Cop 24 in Katowice

The event will also be crucial. During 2018, what was defined at Cop 23 in Bonn, Germany, as the "Talanoa Dialogue" will take place. Its objective is to review the so-called NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions), that is, the pledges made by governments around the world on reducing CO2 emissions. It is precisely on this work that much of the international community's success in tackling climate change will depend. The commitments made so far, in fact, cover only a third of what is needed to keep the rise in average global temperature to a maximum of two degrees Celsius by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial levels.

A miner emerges from a coal mine in Katowice, Poland. The city will host Cop 24 ©Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Even more so than Cop 23, which was expected to be a transitional moment, Cop 24 in Katowice will therefore be fundamental. Poland is, however, among the world's top ten in coal reserves, thanks to which it generates 80 per cent of the energy it consumes: it is therefore likely that the Warsaw government will do everything it can to defend it. According to Aleksander Sniegocki, of the WiseEuropa research centre, speaking to the newspaper Ouest France, the European nation's coal production is still very high: 70 million tonnes a year in 2016 (though sharply down from 1989 levels, when it reached 180 tonnes).

Poland has never launched a plan to phase out coal

Thanks in part to imports, however, Poland remains the most important consumer of the fossil fuel in Europe: it still provides heating for four in five homes nationwide. And the vast majority of domestically sourced raw material comes from the Silesia voivodeship, whose regional capital is Katowice itself. Furthermore, although the mining sector appears to be in financial difficulty (it has received 60 billion in public subsidies over the past 25 years), the right-wing party Law and Justice, in government since 2015, has never even contemplated halting coal extraction.

For her part, Patricia Espinosa – executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Unfccc) – diplomatically stated that she was "happy to be able to work with Poland's Minister of the Environment, Jan Szysko, and his team". The official is nonetheless perfectly aware that failure at Cop 24 is not an option: at Katowice, negotiations on the concrete modalities for implementing the Paris Agreement, reached two years ago at the conclusion of Cop 21, will also need to be concluded.

The world will need to choose – among other things – a "Rule Book", that is, a system of shared rules to make the commitments made in the French capital operational. It will then need to define the actions to be taken before 2020, when the 2015 Agreement will effectively enter into force. And it will need to attempt to settle once and for all the deeply thorny and unresolved question of the financing needed to tackle climate change and to support the most vulnerable nations in adapting to it. By the end of Cop 24, in short, we will know fairly clearly which direction the world will have decided to take.

Cop 24 will be held in Katowice, in the heart of Poland's coal country