Let's talk about why we are really hosting this conference in Copenhagen.
It is called COP 15, not because it has anything to do with Copenhagen.
You could think so.
COP, Copenhagen.
It doesn't.
It's good for the branding of the city, but its unrelated COP is an abbreviation for
Conference of the Parties, in this case Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Climate
Change Convention.
Pretty old thing, and this is the 15th annual conference of all the nations of the UN, all
the UN nations, coming together to review the convention and what needs to be done.
But this is a very special COP because we are in a situation where the Kyoto Protocol,
the first real attempt at doing something about climate change in an international way
is about to expire.
It expires in 2012, and people are saying, what comes after this?
It's not like the problem has diminished in any way, shape or form, so we need to look
at that.
Therefore, at the COP 13, which you might calculate was two years ago on the island of Bali, all
the UN nations came together and agreed to set a deadline for agreeing on what comes
after 2012 in Copenhagen at COP 15.
That's why there's so much talk, not just in town, but everywhere about the Copenhagen
Conference is because all 192 nations agreed to set themselves Copenhagen as a deadline
for agreeing on what's next.
The last COP was COP 14 in Poland, which was sort of a stepping stone, a review halfway
between Bali and Copenhagen, how far we had come.
Now this is a small country, and this is a big conference.
Just to put that into perspective, seen from my desk, what I do is not substance, but logistics.
I need to do the meeting here in practical terms, and to put that into perspective for
you the size of this, this is a very large conference, not just because there's a lot
of people coming, but also because it doesn't play off over 36 hours, as most summits do,
but this is a two-week event.
If you look at the volume of the thing like this, how many meals, how many transportation
kilometers, how many hotel room nights, what's the cost drivers like the number of police
hours, you have to look at the volume, duration times the number of participants.
If you look at it that way, we're actually looking at an absolute Super League monster
summit about the size of 20 European councils, and those of you who have covered European
council will know that those are not small events.
The budget for this is something of a very large nature, especially for a small country.
We're looking at several hundred million Danish Kronos on this, on pure logistics and police
work.
The largest bill being police work, just the manpower of manning a conference like this
in a secure way.
Another way of putting it is, and this is really where I spilled my coffee about two
years ago when I traveled to Canada and talked to the former COP11 hosts and asked them how
do you do this, what is this conference like, tell me about it, how it works, might be a
little bigger in Copenhagen, but tell me how it works, and they threw up this gigantic
organic ram on the PowerPoint and said this was our small organization for handling this.
That's when I spelt my coffee of what I had gotten into when accepting this job, but also
if you look at it, they had a logistic secretariat of more than 200, and communication secretariat
of more than 200 people, so why are we only 20, it's not because we're more efficient
than the Canadians or anything, they're a great help and inspiration for us, we're doing many
things like the Canadians have done, but also, but basically it's a matter of strategy with
20 people as secretariat in the foreign ministry, but we're outsourcing a lot.
We've sort of said if we want to be flexible and if we need, if we get a complete buy-in
from each team member, then we can be no more than 20, but by default then we have to outsource
the rest.
This is just to put it into perspective what we're dealing with, whoops, all right, now
the first question when you plan a conference is how many do you expect to arrive here in
Copenhagen?
And if you look then at different experiences, you can say there was Bali, sorry, Kyoto,
the COP3, there was a little peak in attendance, this is showing you for all the cops up until
now how many people were there.
You also had a peak over here at COP11, which was Montreal, or you could have pointed to
COP6, which was in the Netherlands, why were those two little peaks, well those two were
peaks because this took place when the COP takes place in either North America or Europe,
there's a tendency of higher attendance.
The reason probably being that there are more media, there are representatives, there are
more NGO headquarters around these areas so the participation grows.
Also then you can say we went to COP13 in Bali and had a new record participation there,
why is this?
Well, some people say it's the beach factor, I don't think so, the reason is probably that
somewhere between COP11 and COP13 this whole issue about climate change on a global scale
really exploded.
This is sort of the timeframe when a lot of politicians gave up their climate skepticism
and says this is a real problem, this is really man-made, we need to do something about it.
So some people, the skeptics will still say it's a climate hype, but a lot of people
of us will just say that we're still in an engagement period with climate change and
this will also take place in Copenhagen.
My point with this slide is just to say that all these things are coming together in Copenhagen.
We have a prospect for a deal just like a Kyoto, we are in Western Europe so from experience
attendance is higher and finally we're still in a phase where climate change is absolutely
on the top of everybody's political agenda and all these waves come together to raise
expectations and the size of the summit in Copenhagen.
When you then add to that, that for the first time for all these cups we're now talking
about a possible segment for participation of heads of state and government.
Usually this has been left for the past 14 cups to mostly to ministers for the environment
as heads of delegation, but now we're talking about decisions of such a magnitude that many
people are judging that it will be necessary to engage that level also because there's
so many sectors involved, such a huge financing deal to be discussed, that it's not really
something that can be left for ministers for the environment.
The verdict is still out on that and what important date for that to look for signals
might be tomorrow when the UN Secretary General is hosting his climate summit in New York.
Look for that.
When we estimate, we say we expect, this is numbers we calculate with the UN, 12,000
or 15,000 people to be here, in this center accredited out here, accredited by the UN.
We are building a solution so that we can handle these yellow numbers, 10 to 12, it
is okay.
People might say you could have said a little money here or there, but we're within the
margin of error, 15 to 18,000 we will survive, there might be a little queuing up here and
there, but we will survive, but in these numbers we're in trouble, above 18,000 Copenhagen
might be too small a city, below 10,000 we'll really get in trouble for how much money we
spent on this.
This is the same break up of the participation level for the first 15 COPs, but now we're
not looking at just the number of participants, but actually also at who is participating
and there's one major difference here compared to many other summits and international meetings
that you might be covering and that is the green part here, because the green part shows
NGO participation, about roughly half of the participants at these COPs are representatives
from NGOs, roughly speaking one quarter are journalists, roughly speaking one quarter
are the actual representatives of member nations discussing and negotiating the deal.
This gives the meeting a different atmosphere, I keep comparing to other summits that I know
one that was here in 1995, the UN social summit, which was for comparable size, 120 heads
of state and government participated in that, but the NGOs were outside.
Also compared to European Council, which is the summit we know best in the foreign ministry,
and the atmosphere is just different here.
You do get the alternative feel to it, it's not just the ties and the suits talking, it
has a different atmosphere when the NGOs are there in such numbers, but the NGOs in this
sense are not just the green NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace and so on,
these are also business NGOs representing oil interest and so forth, all types which
are accredited by the UN.
Some will not be accredited by the UN for different reasons, because they're too young,
I don't have the right rules and procedure or not, haven't shown a consistent commitment
to the climate issue, whatever.
They will also be coming to Copenhagen or outside these numbers, but there is a parallel
meeting going on in Copenhagen also specifically for NGOs that are not accredited out here
in Copenhagen, which is likely to be a lot more colorful than what's going on out here.
I won't bore you with the bureaucracy on how we're dividing tasks, but just to tell you
that we set up, we basically divided the task into four.
There is the negotiations, the substance, we set up a ministry for climate change and
energy where the minister there is heading our negotiations.
There is logistics, that's what I do in the foreign ministry.
Then there is public diplomacy, relations with NGOs and press and so forth.
That is done also by the foreign ministry, but another department than mine.
And finally, there are business-related activities, because when we do this, when a country like
ours play host to a conference of this size, of course we also have business interest in
it.
The reason why we are investing in it and came, if you look at it, the ideas about this
came later than the actual idea of setting up the meeting.
But climate-related technologies, clean tech is our fastest growing export.
We do have solutions to offer in this field and therefore, of course, we're trying to
create a platform also for our companies to come to market with the message that, hey,
guys, out there negotiating the deal, they're actually solutions ready on the table to be
selected and implemented if the politicians decide to do something about it.
So this is the menu for a guy doing logistics.
I won't bore you with everything.
Just one little point, and that is, this is the usual stuff.
This is what you do when you host a wedding, and this is what you do if you do a large
conference.
It's always the same, it's just a matter of magnitude.
But this time around, there are large expectations, I would even sometimes say extreme expectations,
that we do this in a green and sustainable way.
Logistics this time around have to prove that we can do it in a completely different way.
Now that is a difficult thing to do.
Let me give you one example of that.
Here you have these plastic bottles, which is from a climate point of view a terrible
thing to do.
One person told me that producing one liter of water in this way wastes about 13 liters
of drinking water, and it also, of course, entails a lot of unnecessary CO2 emissions
just from the transportation alone.
Not really a cool thing to do if you have high quality tap water right out of the tap.
Logistically, this is the easy thing.
This is what you usually do.
You take a cup of trucks, fill them with half liter bottles like this, and you put them
in on the table in the conference centers as they are drunk.
Waste is easy.
You put them in the bins, and whenever the table is empty, you put some more bottles
up there.
That's easy.
But it's not the climate friendly way to do it.
So what we've decided is, as just an example, there won't be any plastic bottles out here
for the conference.
We'll put up little, or as you might have seen one out here, we can get cool drinking
water directly from the net and from the tap.
But when you do that, you need to start calculating what is the actual drinking levels expected
in each part of the center.
What will people be drinking from?
Will they be drinking then from cornstarch cups or maybe recycled paper cups?
Or should we opt for porcelain or glass reusable dishes that cups that then need to be washed
up?
According to a schedule, so you need to have it a guide running around with a little trolley
picking up the cups and washing them up and putting them back.
But to do a schedule like that, then you need to calculate how much water is being drunk
in which parts of the center so that you can have the manning power set up in the right
way.
This is just to tell you, and then you need to communicate to all the delegations coming
here who usually get the message, don't drink the local tap water.
You have to tell them, it's OK here.
And here are all the analysis of why this is OK precisely on this spot.
So my point is that it was what is usually a very simple logistic task.
If you want to do it in a sustainable greenway, it becomes enormously complicated.
So when you hear media reports in December about some corner of what we've done here
logistically not being the greenest and most sustainable way to do it, some carpet material
or some energy used in some device in the kitchen or whatever sent me a nice thought
and say, well, it's not that easy to get everything under control.
Basically when we do greening for a conference like this, greening is actually only priority
number four.
Priority number one is security.
We will not put any delegate into a little electrical light car if they need a bullet
proof limo.
Secondly, logistics will into the very bones support the decision making structure of
a conference like this.
We will not make greening measures that in any way hamper the effort to reach an agreement
in Copenhagen.
So people will not be hungry, they will not be cold, they will not be late, and they
will not be offended by protocol in the way we treat them here.
That would not be a climate friendly approach when we're discussing climate policies.
Thirdly then, we're not even at greening as the top priority, but the third priority
is showcasing the solutions that are out there.
Rather than just picking the greenest limo for heads of state and government, you will
see us picking a host of technologies.
So you will see hydrogen cars, you will see second generation bioethanol, you will see
hybrid cars, fuel cells and so on, biogas, electrical vehicles and so on.
So many of them, which is more important to us, showcasing that there are solutions
for the way we usually do things, rather than just picking the greenest option itself.
Then finally, when these things are in place, then the fourth priority is doing everything
we can to try to make a sustainable conference.
Making a sustainable conference then has to do with number one, cutting away everything
that you don't need.
One example is you just got your little conference kit out here, little bag with some goodies
and so forth.
We will be doing absolutely none of that at this conference as a strict zero-gift policy.
There will be no conference kits, no bags, no frisbees, no hats, nothing like that.
That actually saves us about 4 million Danish corner.
These money have then been put into a scholarship so that instead these are used in a more sustainable
way, we believe, by inviting 11 students from all over the world to come here and do their
fully funded master in climate and energy policies at Danish universities.
They have arrived here on September 1st and have taken up their studies.
You can help us by, because some people will be disappointed when they come here and look
for their goodies and there aren't any, so you can help us a little bit by pushing that
agenda and explaining it's probably a better way of using resources.
That's the first thing, cut away stuff you don't need.
The second thing is then to try to reduce the cost, the emissions from everything that
you do have to do, for instance, transportation.
Here instead of setting up all the buses that shuttle people back and forth to the hotels,
we've simply said, please use existing public transportation, including the metro, but in
return it's free of charge for the two weeks that you are here.
That is a way of reducing emissions from participating.
The third step is then you will have a residual of CO2 emissions from a conference like this
of a large nature, 92% of it actually being from flights to and from Copenhagen, and the
Danish government has then said we will offset that by supporting projects in the rest of
the world which are cutting back equally on CO2 emissions CDM projects or other projects
abroad so that we sort of offset the carbon emissions from the conference itself.
When you see people jumping immediately to the third step, we don't do that, the first
two steps are actually the most difficult ones, cutting away stuff you don't need to
do and reducing the emissions from the activities that you do have.
Quickly about staying here, if you should be coming here to cover the conference, there
are basically three options.
One are the usual hotels, those are expensive in Copenhagen, particularly during this time,
but of course they are there.
The second option is one in the middle.
If you are looking for housing in a private apartment, we have set up a portal so you
can get an apartment there renting it from a private Dane.
It's more of an efficient thing.
You can stay there with a couple of colleagues and you can do your own cooking.
You can cut costs that way and we have a portal offering 1,500 apartments at this point for
our guests.
The most exciting thing is probably the third option, which is an absolutely free option.
We partnered up with an NGO called New Life Copenhagen, an absolutely wonderful NGO.
What they offer is they are trying to entice Danish families to come forward and host a
climate guests for free during this period.
I am pretty excited to say that they have already managed in getting 2,500 families
to sign up for that, which is wonderful because it shows the city in a more hospital way and
it also has an element of people to people so that the Danes have a feel of what's going
on in the city because they can get to know the people who are there here as activists,
as journalists, as delegates for the conference and also the people coming here have a chance
to actually getting to know the Danes a little bit about their country and what it's like
here not just being at their hotel and the Bella Center and it's an absolutely free option.
Finally I just want to point you to our website, which is the place to go for information about
this conference, has all the links and it is not static like any other written material
you might dig up, so this is the place to go.
It's available in the six UN languages plus Danish and has a lot of things not just on
practical issues but also on the debate as such and all sorts of interactive measures
we can indulge in.
I think those are my 20 minutes and I thank you for your attention.
