It's unclear if commentators at COP28 are holding their breaths to see what the Dubai conference will deliver, or because the oil producing country is blanketed in haze.

It's a massive crowd of international delegations, vested interest groups and businesses - too many, say some climate change experts. But it's pressure that officials at COP28 need to know about.

It could be the most consequential international climate change conference yet, but it's being held in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world's major oil producers and led by one of the country's top oil bosses.

Newsroom journalist Rod Oram is attending Cop28 and joins The Detail from the apartment he's staying at in Dubai, where he looks through what's either a sunny haze or human-induced smog.

This is the third COP he's covered, after being in Scotland and Egypt over the last two years.

"COP stands for Conference of the Parties - so the parties are all the nations who have signed up to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - in fact, it's now almost every country in the world," Oram says.

"The convention's hugely important because it's a way of codifying where countries stand on climate issues and how they're dealing with them.

The countries come together and try to make agreements on climate change policy. Arguably, the most significant agreement was made at was COP21 at Paris in 2015, when 196 countries agreed to hold global temperature increases to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

"There's huge value in countries coming together to negotiate fiercely, share ideas and all the rest," Oram says.

"But outside of negotiations, there's this extraordinary wealth of civil society organisations, research institutes, scientists, academics, NGOs, cultural leaders, faith leaders, businesses, youth, indigenous people coming together because these are all common issues, common to all of humanity, so COPs get bigger and bigger. Glasgow in 2021 was about 40,000 people. Cop 27 last year was 45,000 and we've just passed the 100,000 mark here at Cop 28."

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade says New Zealand's COP delegation is being led by new climate change minister Simon Watts.

It includes, but isn't limited to, negotiators from the Ministry for the Environment, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Ministry for Primary Industries, one iwi Māori representative and former climate change minister James Shaw…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details