The climate change conference in Poznań will be a modest affair compared to previous meetings. More than 11,000 delegates attended last year's meeting in Bali, 9,500 went to Montreal in 2005, but ‘only' 8,000 will go to Poland.
The EU institutions will be there in force, sending 172 people from the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, the European Environment Agency and the European Economic and Social Committee. The Commission will send 77 people from its environment, development, enterprise and trade departments among others (plus 18 external experts). Stavros Dimas, the European commissioner for the environment, will attend the high-level segment at the end of the fortnight (10-12 December) with four senior advisers.
This year's Commission delegation is significantly bigger than the 54-strong team that went to Bali in 2007. Most officials will be in Poznań for just one or two days, but a core team of 25 Commission negotiators will stay for the fortnight. The EU member states will send their own national experts. The secretariat of the Council of Ministers will have three officials in place at any one time (rotating between five or six staff). The Parliament will send its largest-ever delegation of 36 MEPs.
Every morning the EU institutions will hold a co-ordination meeting, scheduled for 8-10.30am, at which national heads of delegations will revise EU positions with the input of Commission officials. National governments and the EU institutions have a lengthy programme of side-events to occupy the spare hours between negotiations (see events box).
Carbon footprint
Any large gathering on climate change has a hefty carbon footprint. United Nations officials expect delegates to rack up 13,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, which the Polish government has pledged to offset after the conference. The 200-odd United Nations officials who will be attending the climate conference will be taking trains or buses to Poznań from their base in Bonn in an effort to keep their carbon footprint small.
None of the EU institutions has a collective policy on carbon offsetting, the practice of buying shares in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries to ‘pay for' the carbon cost of travel. The Netherlands and the UK will offset official travel to Poznan´. The Commission's environment department has experimented with carbon offsetting in the past (buying carbon credits to make past Green Week conferences carbon neutral) but has since dropped the idea. Department officials say they prefer to concentrate on cutting emissions rather than offsetting a small proportion.
But some will buy offsets on a private basis: Dimas and his cabinet members will be buying carbon credits from a Danish-based offset company. MEPs on the climate change committee have asked the Parliament's bureau to study offsetting as part of an inquiry into reducing the Parliament's carbon footprint, but for this conference no official policy is in place. The decision to buy carbon credits will be a personal one.
