Friday

29th Mar 2024

Climate summit organisation in disarray

  • Waiting for Godot in the queue for the climate summit venue (Photo: adopt a negotiator)

It was billed as the most important meeting in history. Naturally, as the whole purpose is to save the planet, or at least keep it inhabitable for human beings. But the UN climate conference in Copenhagen itself has so far been pretty uninhabitable for many of the human beings trying to attend.

Thousands of participants from civil society and the media, but also high-level officials from international institutions and members of national delegations to the conference, have had to wait outside in the blustery, sub-zero Nordic winter for up to nine hours only to be told in the end that the Bella Centre venue in the southeast of the Danish capital has reached capacity and they will have to try again tomorrow.

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A total of 192 nations are represented at the meeting, with their attending teams of lawyers, advisors, officials and trailing NGO observers, lobbyists, reporters and activists.

Organisers estimate the number of participants at over 45,000, including 14,000 national delegates, as well as another 4,000 just from the United Nations and 5,000 journalists.

The conference centre only has room for 15,000 people.

Amid reports of some individuals in the thousands-strong, two-kilometre-long queues that snake around the summit venue without food or water, passing out and having to be taken away on stretchers, one Italian participant quipped: "So much for Nordic efficiency."

Reports of police belligerence have not improved the atmosphere.

There were at least portable toilets. And some diversions: The followers of the cult of Supreme Master Ching Hai were preaching veganism to those in the queues while handing out copies of Ms Hai's large coffee-table books on her love for parrots and dogs.

At one point, the local police had to shut the metro station next to the Bella Centre due to health risks arising from more people turning up.

After hours in line, civil society groups have been told they will only be allowed to bring in 10 percent of their teams and will require "secondary" accreditation. Media accreditation was suspended two weeks ago.

One European Commission official told EUobserver that some EU staff had trouble getting in. A campaigner with Friends of the Earth France said he had waited nine hours before being turned away.

The UN said that it "regretted" the congestion and added that it "is doing all it can to alleviate further delays."

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