Life as an endangered species – NGO’s at COP15!
Rumors have been swarming concerning how many NGO/IGO delegates that would be admitted to the two last high level sessions taking place from tomorrow. The initial estimates were 1000 NGO’s during thursday and as little as 90 during friday! Recently the organizers have however following a lot of pressure, agreed to throw a bone to the civil society and has raised the amount of participants during friday to 500… While it is a considerably increase from 90, it is still a ridiculously low amount and does not reflect positively upon the willingness to listen to the civil society.
So the NGO and IGO representatives are slowly becoming an endangered species here in the Bella Center… One may say that the effects of climate change is apparent even in here!
This means that I at least will not have the opportunity to be present in the Bella Center from tomorrow and the day after. Considering that many of the ” meetings are taking place in secrecy anyways, it properly wont matter much anyways.
Let’s hope that the UN at least learns something from the organizational mess they have gotten themselves into during the last week of the conference and that the lack of respect for a NGO/IGO presence during the high level negotiations is not something that will be continued in future UN conference’s.
