COPENHAGEN — There was much stomping of feet in the snowy cold outside the Bella Convention Center here in Copenhagen, home to the UN climate change negotiations. Thousands of participants–negotiators, the media and observers from NGOs and business–waited for up to eight hours to try to gain access to the conference center. Many were turned away: over 40,000 participants have registered for the conference, but the building has capacity for only 15,000. As a result, the UN Secretariat has imposed severe restrictions on the numbers of nongovernmental observers who are allowed into the conference center. As of today, only 7,000 observers were allowed in, and many of those couldn’t get past the crowds. On Thursday that number will be reduced to 1,000. On Friday, the day when the heads of state and government will meet here to try to finalize the deal, a mere 90 nongovernmental observers will be permitted entry.
The NGOs have complained bitterly about the logistical difficulties that have impeded access to the center and the increasing restrictions within the center itself as the week progresses towards the “High-Level Segment” when first ministers and then heads of state and government fly into Copenhagen to make decisions on the options that the lower-level functionaries have set out for them. As the UN Secretariat outlined the restrictions, one civil society observer complained that they were not here for a “vanity contest” and that their exclusion from the high-level segment was unacceptable. The NGOs wrote a strongly worded letter to the UNFCCC Secretariat and the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegaard, in her capacity as president of the conference, stating that the presence of civil society in the final moments of the negotiations was “absolutely crucial for ensuring that the Copenhagen outcomes are just, effective and legitimate”.
Is this true? Do NGO observers play such a critical and valuable role in the negotiations? Observers can be divided into roughly two camps. The first are the COP junkies, those who know the intricacies of the negotiations through full-time engagement with the core issues and repeat attendance at the Conference of the Parties year after year. They sit in on the meetings that are open to observers and they hang around the halls and cafes to buttonhole their friends in the official delegations to glance at the latest draft of the negotiating text or to hear anecdotes about the mood inside the halls. These people–representing all interest groups and all sides of the debate on climate change, from green groups to coal advocates and from energy hawks to marine conservationists–are there with the explicit aim of informing or even influencing the negotiations. They do this by interpreting the latest draft for the media or other delegates, by providing expert assistance to the poorer delegations that lack the capacity to cover all issues themselves, and by raising red flags to the media and the outside world when negotiators propose text that they consider unacceptable. In this same category are the more colorful participants in the COPs, the banner-hanging, building-scaling, costume-wearing demonstrators whose chief aim is to attract attention. These are, by and large, professional outfits, embedded in NGO campaigns and deployed at strategic moments to highlight their concerns or express their encouragement at the direction of the talks.
The second category is more diffuse but includes a wide range of NGOs, business associations, international organizations and other groups that work on climate and energy but follow the negotiations only from afar, if at all. They come to the COP to network, present their own work, and participate in “side-events” (meetings on the margins of the negotiations) at what has become the most important annual convening of the climate change community. Their presence and information booths serve as a reminder of the vast number of professional organizations that are interested in the outcome of the negotiations.
The problem is that the annual climate negotiations have become too big, too complicated and too unwieldy. Take a conference convened to make decisions on the most complicated set of issues ever to be decided by humans, begin with180-plus national delegations numbering into the hundreds, add thousands of observers from civil society and academia, throw in a press corps of several thousand, mix in some celebrities, and top it off with over a hundred presidents and prime ministers and the ferocious security that goes with them, and you get one giant indigestible pudding. This week, the system broke down. Observer groups saw the size of their delegations whittled down to a fraction of the original, and then some more, leaving many stranded outside (it’s still not clear whether this was a computer glitch or a decision by the Secretariat to reduce access stiff further below the 7,000 observers). Long delays and angry protests by observers barred from their normal role in this most sensitive stage of the negotiations seem sure to force a rethink of how the UN negotiations will treat observer organizations at future meetings.
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