COP17 Day 3: When the real work starts
The vibe on Day 3 of the COP17 climate change talks is very different to the pomp-and-circumstance of Day 1. The dignitaries have left, the cavalcades went with them, and negotiators have gotten down to business.
Delegates and the media seem to have found their bearings, and so walk determinedly from venue to venue, rather than clogging up passage ways with a confused Brownian motion. Day 1 gave me an incorrect impression that this was a large and self-congratulatory cluster … um … talk, but in fact people are here to work.
From the government negotiators to NGOs to the media, everyone has something to do – whether it is traipse through forests’ worth of paper (more on that later), hand out fliers, get to interviews, file stories or just try not to melt into a sweaty puddle on the floor.
In terms of fashion, I can’t remember a more eclectic conference. There are naturally the folk in penguin suits – and we feel very sorry for them in this heat – women in flowing Indian print skirts, African delegates in traditional dress, women in burqas, the press with their natural laissez-faire attitude to dress-sense. One thing every person here seems to have is a laptop and a backpack for collecting the miscellaneous million handouts.
The grand irony of the day: we’re at a conference on climate change, where people are talking about protecting forests and conserving resources, and yet there’s a documents centre that hands out tens of thousands of A4 pages a day. Probably more. The reason you need a backpack/suitcase is to lug it all about with you.
So I have a theory about the United Nations and paper. Harry Potter fans will get the analogy. In a vault in the wizard bank Gringotts, there is a spell which makes everything you touch multiply 10-fold. The intended result is that you get crushed under the weight of gold treasure you were trying to steal. It’s the same with the UN and paper – everything it touches seems to make the paperwork multiply 10-fold (possibly more).
“Delegate crushed by paper avalanche” actually seems like a plausible headline.