Lines, freezing weather and more lines; as meetings finally began at the climate conference in glasgow, organization and admissions continued to be a problem.
Around 2,000 delegates and journalists were kept in large crowds queuing outside the conference centre, with Guardian reporters noting there appeared to have been a lack of planning as no attempt was made to encourage people to line up rather than just moving forward.
Also, the covers for shelter from the elements hadn’t been put up – although rain is a pretty sure bet in Scotland at this time of year.
There is a real sense of chaos at the entrance where world leaders arrive. Security is now telling people to back off the microphones as delegations fight over tickets to enter. #COP26 pic.twitter.com/n09VMMLkLC
—Patrick Greenfield (@pgreenfielduk) November 1, 2021
Dominic Kavakeb, senior communications adviser at Global Witness, said it took more than an hour to get through security checks at Cop26 Monday morning. “Too many important voices are not being heard at this climate summit,” he said. “Either because they were prevented from participating because of the vaccine or economic inequalities, or, today, because of poor organization by the British government.
“There is a special entry for world leaders and, we assume, for major sponsors, so again it is the activists, many of whom come from communities hard hit by the climate emergency, who are being left behind. .”
Laura Young, attending the conference with Christian charity Tearfund, said she and her colleagues queued outside for almost an hour and a half.
She said: ‘I had colleagues who arrived at odd times throughout the morning and we were all held up in that mass of people queuing outside. I’m inside now and all the chairs are social distancing but that obviously wasn’t the case outside. I hope things will get better in the days to come, but yesterday there were people lining up in the morning saying they weren’t going to be able to have their meetings.
Scenes like this have not been seen at a cop summit since the ill-prepared Copenhagen conference in 2009 according to Guardian environmental correspondent Fiona Harvey.
She said: “It’s inexplicable that the hosts weren’t better prepared because I found myself in a similar queue on Friday. They knew 30,000 people were coming. This time thankfully it’s not raining , but they could have had a better plan for managing the queues.Like many people here, I have already traveled a long way, having left before 8am to get here, so there is a lot of fatigue in the crowd here before we even start but everyone is always in good spirits and just eager to get in.”
Protesters also gathered. Despite the freezing cold, a few small protests have already taken place, including a Ugandan delegation calling on Boris Johnson to take action against President Yoweri Museveni, accused of a wide range of human rights abuses, including the destruction of the environment. A large Bangladeshi crowd gathered by the River Clyde to demand that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina step down. The summit still draws political protests from around the world as activists take advantage of international attention.
US activists from the grassroots Build Back Fossil Free coalition were expected outside the entrance to the Cop26 Blue Zone to demand that the US President take executive action to stop approval of fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency, building on the history People vs. Fossil Fuels Action Week last month in Washington DC
Activists are furious with Joe Biden’s likely ‘climate leadership’ narrative, which they say contradicts the daily suffering of communities on the front lines of gas and oil production in the United States. In the first six months of the Biden administration, around 2,500 new oil and gas permits were authorized – a figure that Donald Trump’s administration took a year to reach.
Meanwhile, inside the convention center it was as if the whole world had arrived in Glasgow. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his team headed down a hallway, while in the opposite direction, officials from Rwanda, Costa Rica and the EU gathered in the area where world leaders were due to arrive and talk. International journalists dove in with questions in several different languages.
Most of the time people were trying to get their bearings, meandering through the network of country lodges, offices and cafes with long queues. Scotland’s favorite drink hasn’t been a hit so far: there were plenty of unloved cans of Irn-Bru piled up.