Carbon Footprint of Doha Climate Change Conference

Each year, signatory parties (countries) of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meet to discuss the climate change related issues. This year, the 18th session of Conferenceof Parties (COP) meeting is held at Doha, Qatar from 26 November to 7 December 2012. These meetings are extremely useful to discuss the agenda and to pave a forward path to combat climate change. Furthermore, they are very useful platform to share and showcase the knowledge and ideas among the world’s leaders, policy makers, community of practitioners, activists and students and researchers.

Very recently, people started to talk about the carbon footprint of delegates who travel long to participate in such meetings. Such meetings are not being able to fulfill the demand of climate change communities; they are also criticized for the high carbon footprint. I found this video on YouTube uploaded by Global 3000 - The Globalization Program calculating the carbon footprint of participants COP 18 meeting, Doha, Qatar.

 

 

The video pose a question ‘how climate summit is damaging climate’ in the beginning. It estimates the CO₂ emissions of 25,000 people who are expected to attend the conference. According to it, as most of them are flying to Doha, the flight will generate about 130,000 tons of CO₂ which is equal to the 5 year production of Mali (Wikipedia: Mali is landlocked West African country, BBC). Similarly, local transportation, electricity consumption, refreshments and hotel accommodation will produce 200 t, 3500 t, 800 t and 1800 t CO₂ respectively. Altogether, the total figure comes around 136,300 t CO₂ which is, according to video, equal to total generation of Bochum, small town of Germany.  

 

I personally feel that such meetings provide a platform for all the people round the globe to discuss in a common problem, Climate Change. However, it is obvious that world is waiting for action, not talk. Hope this COP meeting will bring rays of hopes and actions.

Would love to hear your views too !!!