FAIL: the Copenhagen Conference's Carbon Footprint

Tallying Copenhagen’s Carbon Footprint

By LEORA BROYDO VESTEL, New York Times

Johan Spanner for The New York Times The food court at the Bella Center in Copenhagen.

As the world focuses on the effects of climate change in Copenhagen, some observers are focusing on the impacts of the conference itself.

Despite efforts by organizers to green the conference – by using limos fueled by plant waste, serving organic food and tap water (instead of bottled), and offering the free use of 200 bicycles – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change estimates that the conference will generate about 40,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. (By way of comparison, Denmark, the conference host, emitted 72 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2006.)

Most of this is the result of travel to and from Copenhagen by the 15,000 or so participants (not including thousands of journalists), but it also includes emissions that result from energy use at the Bella Center (which has nearly 80,000 square meters of conference space and enough telecommunications infrastructure to handle 80,000 simultaneous phone calls), hotel stays and local transportation.

Martin Nesirky, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, said in a news briefing on Tuesday that action is be taken to ensure pollution generated by the conference is canceled out – via an emissions-reduction project in Bangladesh.

“The Danish government says it is offsetting the emissions through a project in Bangladesh that reduces emissions in a brick manufacturing plant,” Mr. Nesirky said. “And the offset more than covers all the travel and emissions related to the conference.”

According to the Danish Ministry of Climate and Energy, the million-dollar project, made possible through an agreement between Denmark, the World Bank and Bangladesh, will involve replacing heavily polluting brick kilns with 20 new energy efficient ones. The kiln swap, the ministry notes, will cut more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year and “improve air quality in one of the world’s most polluted cities.”

Still, groups like Greenpeace say organizers didn’t go far enough in addressing the event’s carbon footprint. Tarjei Haaland, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace, told the Copenhagen post that claims of being “carbon neutral” were effectively meaningless.