[LINK] Internet enhanced meetings for post-Copenhagen

[Ivan Trundle]

I think that there is a misunderstanding of why CoP15 had so many delegates.

Previous conference secretariats have never placed limits on the numbers of people attending, because up until CoP15, not many people wanted to be involved.

The conference in Copenhagen had space for 15,000 people, but registrations sky-rocketed to 35,000. Consequently, the secretariat applied quotas to each delegation (political and NGOs alike) and tried to rearrange meetings so that things would run as smoothly as possible.

What surprised the secretariat was that many thousands of 'ordinary' people wanted to attend: even the protest march had more than 60,000 people (police reports put it at 30,000, the protesters said more than 100,000, and given the number of 4-hr arrests - 1000 - I'd say that 60,000 would be a conservative estimate).

The next meeting (to be held in Bonn will have serious restrictions placed on all delegate numbers if only to try to limit the amount of work required: negotiators were working 24 hours a day (in teams) in the months leading to the conference, and the amount of ad-hoc meetings held in hotel rooms and at the conference was staggering, apparently.

It's totally ludicrous to assert that this could have been achieved online, even though my livelihood depends on finding exactly this kind of solution to the problem.

It's also totally ludicrous to assert that it was a party or junket for those attending: or that it was merely a gab-fest. There are some countries such as Tuvalu or Kiribati that want action now and for very good reason.

iT