Hannah Rowlands, our in-house science advisor attended the Copenhagen COP-15 climate change negotiations in December. Hannah wrote up her experience of the ups and downs of the conference which we wanted to share.I was lucky enough to be in Copenhagen for a brief visit during the COP15 climate change negotiations in December 2009. My trip was a mix of disappointments and unexpected opportunities, as well as the chance to see several different climate change worlds.
I'd not been to a COP (Conference of the Parties to the 1992 UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)) before, so didn't really know when, during the two-week process, would be the best time to be there, so we rather arbitrarily decided that I would go during the second week, when hopefully things would be quite tense and interesting.
Oxford University, where I did my Masters degree, were kind enough to let me join their delegation of students and academics, which would allow me entrance to the actual negotiations being held in the Bella Centre.
In the first week, I was following closely the news coming out of Copenhagen as well as the emails going around the Oxford University delegation. At the negotiations, I was hearing about walk-outs by developing nations and harsh police behaviour at protests, and from Oxford University I was hearing about incredibly long queues to get into the cavernous Bella Centre. I wasn't sure what to expect when I finally go there.
On the day of my flight (for the record, we did look into taking the train and it took around 24 hours and cost around 3 times as much as flying, sorry, we're on a budget...) I received an email from the Oxford University delegation organiser saying that rumours were going around about limitations to the number of NGO (Non-Governmental Organisations) people being allowed into the Bella Centre for the rest of the week. However, since I was only there for one full day, Oxford University offered me one of their strictly limited passes for Wednesday. By the time I arrived on Tuesday evening, I was told that they were not allowing any new NGO registrations, which would make that precious pass completely useless.
So, I took the shuttle bus from the airport directly to the Bella Centre in the hope of registering before it was too late. Unfortunately, I arrived just after registration had closed. It just wasn't going to be.
My first event in Copenhagen was a very prestigious reception hosted by the UN Foundation and Deutsche Bank, to which I was kindly invited by Mark Fulton, who is one of our private investors. And so I caught a glimpse of my first climate change world – the corporate, high-level, governmental world. This world involved high security – road blocks and passport checks – and champagne, as well as discussion of enormous sums of money and “game-changing” technologies. From inside this world, climate change can be solved by putting enough money in the right places. I was surprised and impressed by how mainstream this world is now. There was a televised address by Bill Clinton urging delegates at Copenhagen to do their best to solve the problems of climate change. Bankers, representatives of the world's biggest companies, US Senators, all big guns in our society, and all talking about what to do to tackle climate change.
After the reception, I went along to an event called “Canopy Canapés”, a drinks reception to highlight the issues of deforestation, held at the Copenhagen Botanical Gardens in a glorious 19th Century glass hot house. I met with my Oxford University friends, and had been hoping to pick up my pass for the next day, although I now realised that the pass had better go to someone else who had been able to register at the Bella Centre.
This was the second climate change world I saw in Copenhagen. It was made up of passionate academics and NGO folks, working somewhere in between the bottom-up grassroots movement and the top-down government-corporate world.
I had decided to go to the Bella Centre, despite knowing I couldn't get inside. I had heard about another protest happening that morning and I wanted to see it for myself. The Bella Centre is on the metro from central Copenhagen. The night before, I had got the shuttle bus straight up to the Bella Centre but this morning the police had decided, what with the threatened protests, and the arrivals of state leaders, to heighten security. The metro station for the Bella Centre was closed, and delegates had to walk from neighbouring stations, going through police roadblocks placed half-way between those neighbouring stations and the Bella Centre.
Without a pass, I couldn't get through the roadblock, but I could sit on the metro as it shot straight pass the Bella Centre on its overhead tracks. Once again, there were huge queues of delegates waiting to get in, then there was a large gap of empty road, another roadblock, and then a huge crowd of protesters. I knew the protesters were planning to storm the Bella Centre, but it was clear the police weren't going to let them even get close to the building, let alone get inside.
After travelling up and down the metro past the Bella Centre a few times, I continued into central Copenhagen to meet Mark Fulton for lunch. He generously gave me two hours of his time to discuss ideas for the game (as well as a delicious lunch at his hotel's restaurant). I came away from the lunch buzzing with ideas for the game to work on in January.
The central square in Copenhagen was filled with climate change-related posters, sculptures and booths. The whole city really had gone climate change mad! Various well-known companies seemed to be vying for advertising space on billboards, telling us how much they were doing to tackle climate change.
Copenhagen Business School had offered a lecture theatre with a webcam showing the live feed of the negotiations for those who didn't have passes for the Bella Centre. I tried watching the negotiations for a while, but, I confess, it was incredibly boring and, with another Oxford University student friend, I decided instead to check out the Klima Forum. This was a civil society parallel conference, hosted by the Danish Government in a central Copenhagen leisure centre, with talks and films about climate change, as well as – and this was crucial in the increasingly cold, snowy weather – a warm building with food and hot drinks.
And so I saw the third climate change world – the civil society, grassroots, activist world. I briefly bumped into a friend from Oxford who had been at the protests earlier in the day, had been very nearly arrested earlier in the week, and had spent the afternoon doing press interviews about the unreasonable (in his opinion) behaviour of the Danish police. The Klima Forum was full of slightly scruffy-looking students sitting in hallways, hats and scarves and gloves strewn around the floor. I found myself in a nice, warm room watching the most appallingly awful film about completely nonsense technological solutions to climate change. This was a shame, as I want to believe that unexpected solutions might crop up and help humanity out, but the suggestion to help home-inventors come up with zero-point energy on the off-chance that it might solve climate change was so out of keeping with the enormity of the problems being addressed at Copenhagen that it just annoyed me.
On Thursday, my last day in Copenhagen, I had only one appointment, which was to take a test drive in an electric car in Copenhagen but, before heading back over the bridge for the last time, I took an hour to walk around Malmö and buy some pretty Swedish Christmas decorations. And now, finally, on the train going over the Oresund Bridge, I could see the view of the straits between the two countries. I also saw the wind farm in the middle of the sea, lines of turbines vanishing into the distance.
Both Malmö and Copenhagen were, by this point, covered in snow, and this was providing one cause of disruption to transport. The second disruption was due to “protesters on the tracks”, as the announcement on the train informed us. I wasn't sure, however, what was actually happening to cause these protesters to be on the tracks. I can imagine perhaps they were deliberately causing disruptions, or maybe they were being chased by police and accidentally ended up on the tracks? Thirdly, the arrival of more heads of state was causing closures of roads and stations. Luckily, from this point of view, I was leaving before Barack Obama was due to arrive, which was going to cause the closure of the Oresund Bridge to road traffic for several hours.
All of these disruptions unfortunately also caused my electric car test drive to be cancelled, as the roads were too slippery. Nevertheless, I went along to the venue to have a look at the car and chat with the engineers. As it turns out, the electric car company in question had hired out the lobby of the Radisson Hotel in central Copenhagen to display their electric cars. I had to show my passport and have my bag searched before I was allowed into the hotel. Being told that the Chinese delegation were staying at this hotel helped explain this heightened security. The hotel was, inevitably, a nice, warm place, so I spent quite some time finding out all about electric cars and the systems that are being put in place to make them more affordable, such as car owners leasing the batteries rather than purchasing them, and how they can be integrated into renewable electricity systems to help deal with the issues of intermittency (car batteries can be told by the grid to charge during the night at times of greatest wind speed, for example).
By this point, I only had a handful of hours left before my flight, so I took myself back into central Copenhagen to the main shopping street to get some lunch. After that, I got the metro to airport and, after a slightly tedious but not so bad given the weather conditions delay of two hours, was on my flight back to the UK.
I was very pleased to have been in Copenhagen, even though I never actually saw the negotiations at first hand. In some ways, arriving as late as I did without any real hope of getting in, I was saved the horrendous queues that other delegates endured. But just being in the city, talking with people about the negotiations, it became a real, immediate thing, rather than a distant process that was only happening on BBC News.
As for these multiple climate change worlds that I experienced, I was concerned at how little overlap there was, and the antagonism between them. I feel that the people in the grassroots, activist world feel that radical behavioural and social change are required to deal with climate change, and that neither governments nor corporations can really do anything helpful in the process, indeed they are a hindrance and therefore not to be engaged with.
On the other hand, in the corporate, government world, I feel that there's an understandable resistance to radical change in lifestyles, and perhaps an over-optimistic reliance on technological solutions. However, this is where huge amounts of money are being promised, and can be made, through development of technologies. This may not be a bad thing, as the scale is large.
The only world I didn't see, then, was the actual world of the negotiations which was, I suppose, ultimately the least effective one at Copenhagen. I left before the final hours of the negotiations, and could only read about it in the news.
Of course it was disappointing that a new climate change treaty was not agreed at Copenhagen. People are now wondering whether the future of international climate change action is going to be outside the UNFCCC, with countries simply doing their best to reduce emissions without binding targets. Would that allow countries to get on with dealing with climate change without the drag of waiting for all countries to agree, or will it lead to countries not achieving nearly enough emissions reductions because there's no impetus to strive for more? And what does it mean for certain sectors, like forestry, for which the negotiations at Copenhagen did in fact come up with an agreement? Does that agreement have to wait until the new overall treaty exists, if ever, before it can come into force, or can it go ahead on its own?
As for the new treaty, we have to wait for COP16 in Mexico, December 2010. And in the meantime, think of all the carbon dioxide emissions that will continue to be emitted until then.
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