Civil society participation in Copenhagen

COP 15 in Copenhagen has ended this Saturday in the early morning with practically no real results. Not only were decisive measures to mitigate climate change postponed, there was not even a clear signal regarding COP 16 in Mexico. If the world's leaders were not able to produce a post-Kyoto treaty, it would have at least been their duty to set the foundations for further (meaningful!) negotiations at the next talks. But not even this absolute minimum was achieved.

Nevertheless Copenhagen also delivered some positive signals. I was impressed with the 'Klimaforum', the 'alternative summit' of the civil society and NGOs active in climate change which was organized right next to Copenhagen's main train station. There were a lot of presentations from different NGOs and scientists working on climate change everyday. At most times there were at least four different seminars and talks to choose from, each focusing on very different issues of climate change. And most importantly climate change got a real face at the 'Klimaforum'. There were representatives from the landless movements from Latin America, Bangladeshis explaining the dire situation of their country to other visitors and photo exhibitions on the effects of climate change from the Maldives, Sri Lanka and many different places. The pictures of vanishing beaches and dying coral reefs on the Maldives underline that we are not only talking about abstract figures but about the lives and homes of people.

The Klimaforum had everything the Bella Center was missing: the talks were close to the realities on the ground, victims of climate change were directly included, there was a spirit of change uniting participants from all continents and most importantly there were hope and determination. This strong, multinational civil society movement is still at its starting point. It will grow with each UNFCCC meeting and will ensure that the pressure on the world's leaders to act will rise.

The professionalism some NGOs are already displaying in steering media attention and pressure is reassuring. On Wednesday for example, a group consisting of Canadian citizens, the red clothed 'Climate Debt Agents' and the Yes Men managed to make Canada's obstructive climate change policy look completely foolish in the global media. The group had sent out e-mails from a fake Canadian government e-mail account called press@enviro-canada.ca in which Canada promised a 40% cut of emissions and considerable sums of money to pay back their 'climate debts' to developing countries. Of course Canada could have reacted somehow at this point to avoid a public loss of face, but the NGOs were too cunning to let this happen. They published a video from a fake press conference of an Ugandan delegate that they had recorded in a reconstruction of Bella Centers main press room. The supposed Ugandan delegate as well as the 'media representatives' in the video were all climate change activists. In the press video the Ugandan delegate lauded Canada's recent commitments and talked about a break through at COP 15. In another e-mail form a fake government mail account the group then faked a Canadian reaction, stating the following: 

- We at Environment Canada wish to thank the international press community for their measured and understanding response to the hoax that struck our agency earlier this afternoon, while expressing our condolences to the Ugandan delegation who were swept up in the excitement of this false future "vision."Environment Canada wishes to stress that the Ugandan delegation's impassioned response to the announcement is a dramatic tragedy for those who stand to suffer the most. 
"It is the height of cruelty, hypocrisy, and immorality to infuse with false hopes the spirit of people who are already, and will additionally, bear the brunt of climate change's terrible human effects," said Jim Prentice, Canada's Minister for the Environment. -

At this point a small group of climate change activists had exposed Canada's climate policy and shut all loopholes the Canadian government would have had to escape this public relations disaster unscathed. Sophisticated actions like this heighten the pressure on governments that are not willing to make concessions regarding climate change. If we see more activities like this in the future, obstructive policies in climate change negotiations will become more and more costly for governments. And eventually we will reach a point at which the parties just cannot afford another failure like the one in Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen 'Roundup'

So I arrived home today after my two-days short trip to Copenhagen to visit the UNFCCC talks. Even though I have only stayed there for two days it was an incredibly rich experience. There was really everything in Copenhagen, from multinational NGO events communicating a real 'one world feeling' to massive, green-washing PR-campaigns of large multinational companies. I will write a short series on my experiences in Copenhagen over the next few days, trying to reflect the diversity of what is going on in Copenhagen these days. De facto the Climate Change Talks are split up in three, more or less separate, parts: the official talks in Copenhagen's Bella Center, where only accredited government representatives and civil society organizations may enter, the Klimaforum, an alternative civil society summit with NGO representatives from all over the world, and an exhibition area in the town center that is mainly (but not exclusively) used by companies and businesses to present their would-be green image.

When I arrived on Monday morning in Copenhagen after a ten hour trip in the night train from Frankfurt, I went directly to Bella Center for registration. The travel was stopped short at Orestad, one metro station south of Bella Center. We had to go on walking since the metro could only be used by people who had already registered. When we approached Bella Center by foot we soon saw that things would not be as easy as anticipated: there was already a queue of roughly half a mile of diplomats, NGO representatives and delegates waiting to register at Bella Center. In the beginning things were still interesting. We met a lot of people from different NGOs and from different backgrounds in the queue and time was going by quickly. Later people from the Asian web-tv "supreme master tv" started to distribute "vegan starter packages", calling attention to the masses of CO2 that are produced by cattle breeding (even though they were exaggerating the figures grotesquely, claiming that 90% of global emissions stem from cattle breeding). Some activists were disguised as chickens or elks, my personal favorite was the shrimp girl in a pink full-body shrimp suit, complete with antennae and red cheeks.

After three hours waiting in the cold I started to put on extra layers of clothes. Progress was VERY slow, but the queue was moving. I didn't have any  feeling in my toes anymore, but I really wanted to get inside, so I stayed. After three and a half hours there was absolutely no movement in the queue anymore, but I could finally see the entrance. Some people were slowly getting angry, chanting 'let us in' and 'shame on you'. But there was still a big screen TV on which I could watch the 'climate change report' from India or the 'Fossil of the Day' award for the hundredth time, so somehow we carried on.

During all this time there was absolutely no information from part of the UNFCCC secretariat or the Danish hosts. All the people standing in the line for hours had received a preliminary accreditation and were encouraged by the UNFCCC secretariat to start planning their travels to Copenhagen. Some people were standing around in mini-skirts for hours at temperatures below 0°C, others had traditional African or Arabian clothes, clearly not prepared for the long wait in the freezing cold.

After waiting five hours in the cold there was an announcement that the organizers did not know how long registration for the waiting people would take, but that registration would close at 6 pm as planned. At that time it was 4 pm, the queue was still nearly half a mile long, some of the people waiting since 11 am (like me). Some minutes later people passed around a single sheet from the UNFCCC secretariat, stating that apart from Tuesday even less people would be let in. Additionally a system of limited 'secondary badges' was due to be introduced to limit the number of people accessing the conference grounds. On Friday, the most important day, only 90 NGO representatives will be allowed to enter.

To make the long story short: like thousands of other NGO representatives we have not seen Bella Center from the inside. We stayed the rest of our time at the civil society summit "Klimaforum". I was disappointed, but after all we had not put in as much work, time, money, effort and HOPE into our trip to Copenhagen as many NGOs and their representatives from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some of these people have traveled for  thousands of miles and have paid a lot of money to make their voices and the voices of the principal victims of climate change heard. And the UNFCCC secretariat, the Danish hosts and the government parties are actively excluding these people. Their voices matter most, yet they will not be heard. Additionally many NGOs from poorer countries do not even have the money to stay for one or two weeks in Copenhagen. These NGOs are coming on the last days, because they were hoping for a maximum impact of their participation at the peak of the negotiations. These people will never gain access to the Bella Center. The 90 NGO representatives allowed in on Friday will probably be hand-picked and the secondary badges necessary to enter will have run out long ago.

This is the background of the demonstrations and the attempts to storm the Bella Center that we see on the news tonight. I went to Copenhagen because I was interested in gathering first hand experiences, because I was curious and because I wanted to witness international negotiations from up close. Today I am angry, frustrated and deeply disappointed of how the issue of climate change is handled at the expense of the poor and excluding the persons most concerned. 

And of course other people, who feel the impact of climate change in their everyday life, are even more angry and frustrated because they see that our leaders do nothing. They only debate meaningless figures of percentile emission reductions, referring to different base years, while the atmosphere does not care about base years and output reductions. What really matters is the total amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, percentile output reductions only buy time but do not solve the problem. Even if climate change is a phenomenon too complex for anyone to grasp in its entirety, people see that this game of numbers our leaders are playing is meaningless. And additionally our leaders exclude the people on the ground, the ones who really suffer from climate change. The heads of states in Bella Center are sure lucky that the majority of the victims of climate change is too poor to come to Copenhagen. The message to the heads of state is clear: step up to your responsibility and lead, or step aside and let people really willing to make a change do the job!

The run-up to Copenhagen 2

Tomorrow is the starting day of the biggest and most decisive intergovernmental conference in 2009, the UNFCCC in Copenhagen. So far the year has been dominated by conferences and meetings on the global financial and economic crisis which have tied a lot of attention resources that probably would have been better invested in discussing the issue of the single most historical importance of our generation: global climate change.

Only in the last months have the efforts of climate change mitigation been able to reconquer some room in the global political agenda that they had lost to the efforts of coping with the fallout of the global recession. But this process has been gaining momentum recently. Newspapers are full of series, articles, essays and opinion pieces on climate change and the Copenhagen talks. And seemingly the trend is even strong enough to counter tendencies to postpone the decision-making in climate change mitigation to future conferences. Some of the most important powers on an international scale, including China and the USA, had already denied the possibility to implement decisive measures in Copenhagen at the APEC summit some weeks ago. Now US-President Barack Obama felt obliged to change his Copenhagen schedule due to rising public pressure: he will attend the decisive final stages of the talks instead of only visiting the conference along the way to pick up his Nobel Peace Price. Taking into consideration that he personally attended the IOC meeting deciding on the scene of the Summer Olympics 2016, it would have been grotesque to absent himself from the final stages of the Copenhagen talks.

From the perspective of an observer organization attending the talks, the mounting flurry of activities connected to the Copenhagen summit is even more obvious. In the final days leading to the start of the talks more and more e-Mails concerning the conference have arrived at the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations (FRFG). They reflect the plurality of organizations attending the talks and the range of interests that will be voiced in the process. Event managers are promoting berths on cruise liners for representatives of observer organizations. Other organizations are trying to sell excess rooms that had been booked in advance or are looking for funding of their travel and accommodation costs. A 'spiritual on-line TV station' contacted us to ask if we had a booth at the venue of the conference and if they could cover our activities in Copenhagen in the scope of their program. Many organizations contacted us in order to arrange for meetings during the talks to discuss future possibilities of cooperation. Other organizations have been passing around petitions to include everything from water shortage to livestock breeding in the talks. Companies from Brazil are advertising their know-how in ethanol fuels and are pushing for funding of their technology. Other organizations are informing fellow participants ("There is some good news you should know about so as not to be surprised when you get to Copenhagen.") of a "new green, low-cost sustainable fuel" that "can be stored at any location" and that will be "the solution to global warming". It can even be used as a fertilizer!

It becomes clear that organizations, companies and people from very different backgrounds with very different agendas and interests will participate in the summit. The conference will be a very diverse event and the venue will surely be bustling with interesting, dedicated and eccentric people. Lets hope that the observer organizations will be able to put some pressure on the government representatives deciding about the fate of future generations despite their very different interests and approaches. There is no time to bury one's head in the sand/snow.