It’s day three at the Copenhagen Climate Talks and I thought I would take a few minutes to give my reflections on the event so far. The first word to describe COP15 is massive. The venue is enormous – it takes at least 15 minutes to get from the entrance security to our office. You really have to take into account the distance you need to walk to get to a meeting or a side event and it was not a good idea to be wearing new shoes! The number of participants is crazy – we heard that over 34,000 people tried to register for the event but the venue can only hold 15,000 (which is more than enough I’d have thought).

The second phrase that comes to mind is controlled mayhem. Aside from it taking three hours for some of our delegates to actually get in the door on Monday (security + registration + thousands of people = queues), everywhere you look, there is a person dressed up as a tree, or a troupe of performance artists with a message about the environment, or a mini protest. And that’s before we start talking about the official proceedings!

You may have heard about the two biggest stories of Monday and Tuesday:

• A copy of a ‘secret’ agreement that was being worked on by a few countries in parallel to the main agreement was leaked to The Guardian.
• And today’s surprise intervention by the island state of Tuvalu, who proposed a new Protocol to run alongside the Kyoto Protocol. This caused major ructions amongst the G77 + China group of which they are a part, but seems to have a lot of support from other small island states and NGOs.

So I would imagine that there will be people working until the early hours tomorrow morning to try ensure the talks progress and don’t get mired in political games – I am writing this at 9pm and there are still a lot of delegates floating around – in fact the photo above was just taken.

From an aviation perspective, we took part in the ICAO side event yesterday where we spoke about our industry goals and targets. We have spent the last couple of days talking to delegations from a number of countries about our industry position. There has not been a lot of news to report, as aviation emissions have been a very small part of the programme – with much more challenging subjects such as the battle over CBDR in focus.

Tomorrow, we will be talking about our work on biofuels at a side event hosted by the Bellona Foundation and on Friday will be speaking about operational efficiency at an event hosted by the Romanian government.