PASSENGERS IN Copenhagen airport are greeted by billboards featuring digitally aged photographs of world leaders in 2020, including a grey-haired Gordon Brown, an aged Barack Obama and a much less vigorous Nicolas Sarkozy: “I’m sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change . . . We didn’t.”
The eye-catching signs were paid for by Greenpeace International and the Tcktcktck campaign – everyone is trying to get noticed as the city swells with climatologists.
At Kongens Nytorv in the city centre, the World Wildlife Fund has installed an ice sculpture of a life-size polar bear, with a bronze skeleton embedded in it with the idea that it will melt down over the course of the two-week conference.
Inside the UN’s 15th climate change conference (COP 15) proceedings kicked off with an endless series of meetings from 8am. Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told delegates that one aim of his government was to limit the conference’s carbon footprint.
Thus, there is no bottled water, “only fresh water from the tap”, and two-thirds of all the food being served in the Bella centre is organic, and all locally produced.
Delegates and hangers-on were warned that the maximum capacity was 1,500 – or about a tenth of the number of people who have arrived for the conference. The overflow was entertained in the vast square, which now has a huge “interactive globe” as its centrepiece. According to the mayor, it’s meant to symbolise how Copenhagen – which plans to become the first carbon-neutral city by 2025 – is now “Hopenhagen”, offering hope all over the world.