COP15 Day 1
December 7, 2009
COP15, the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference, has convened in Copenhagen, Denmark. For the next 11 days, as many as 15,000 participants, including 110 heads of state and government, from 192 countries will meet to discuss solutions to climate change, set against the background of the last update to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol.
Though the participant list is exclusive and even some media have had trouble getting accredited, the conference has already taken advantage of technology that didn’t exist during the 1997 meetings in Kyoto, providing updates on Twitter, Facebook and even YouTube. To make sense of all the information coming out of Copenhagen, Flow will be running a series of daily blog entries to keep you up-to-date on the latest news from the largest climate change event in the world.
Today, we’re talking about spectacle and tone.
Spectacle is an important part of any global meeting, designed as much to set a tone as it is to raise an event’s profile, and COP15’s opening has been no different. Directed by Mikkel Blaabjerg Poulsen, “Please Help the World” opened the conference with its message of forward-thinking self-interest, framed by a little girl’s nightmare about earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. If we don’t change now, the video suggests, we’ll experience catastrophe later. It finishes with the tagline: “We have the power to save the world. Now.”
On the one hand, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” is a tried and true message that’s used everywhere from appeals for charity to The Simpsons’ immortal Helen Lovejoy. It’s not a point that Poulsen contests, saying: “We have made a film which speaks to the heart rather than to the brain.”
On the other hand, the film is entirely consistent with the tone the conference is aiming to set. Urgency is the byword of a conference based on predictions of imminent catastrophe, nicely illustrated on its “Climate Thinkers Blog.” Written by scientists, NGO-representatives, politicians, businesspeople and others, the blog includes titles like “Time is up – the deadline is Copenhagen” and statements like “I urge governments to gather all the human ingenuity, material resources and moral resolve their nation can offer and embark on an unmistakable turn of course towards resilience and sustainability – now!” Without urgency, there is no need to set concrete targets, which underlies the entire conference.
Whether its spectacle will be enough to build the urgency needed to accomplish the conference’s goal of action on climate change, only the next two weeks will tell. What’s certain is that, as those appeals and discussions leak out of the conference on video, social media and others, Flow will be here to point you in the direction of Copenhagen’s most important issues. One day down, 11 more to go.
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