Ice sculptures are a tradition at climate change conferences. As befits the world’s biggest climate meeting, the Copenhagen summit has not one but two melting polar bears, only a few hundred yards apart.
One was brought over from the UK by the British artist Mark Coreth, who filled a container with water in a warehouse in Wembley. He then took a 9½-tonne block of ice to Copenhagen, where he carved out his bear in Nytorv Square on Saturday morning.
It started to melt straight away and by the time the conference began this morning you could already see the twisted bronze skeleton of a polar bear jutting out. “In the end,” Coreth said, “we’re going to have a pool of water, a polar bear skeleton and a grim message.”
He does not know how long it is going to last, but says that is the point: nobody knows how long the Arctic ice will last either. A couple of tourists pass by and he urges them not just to look but to touch. “This is the Arctic: you can touch the Arctic and it melts.”
Around the corner, outside the national parliament building, is a slightly smaller local version, to which the finishing touches were being put only hours before the conference started. Dr Per Christiansen, director of zoology at Aalborg Zoo, is overseeing the operation and explains that it is being left a bit “portly” for a reason: so that by the time the speeches began the bear would be nice and sleek.
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Dr Christiansen’s zoo celebrated what it said was a world-first last week when it filmed the birth of a polar bear. But the zoologist – who says that his job is increasingly to act as a kind of Noah’s Ark for endangered animals – fears that the bears could be wiped out in the wild in just a few decades.
“It could happen very, very quickly,” he says. “We can maintain it as a living museum exhibit but when the sea ice has gone the polar bear will be gone too.”
Dr Christiansen says his ice bear is carbon-neutral because of the green electricity used to power its freezer. Coreth says his bear is low-carbon too as the Wembley warehouse was already being used to freeze vegetables. He will unveil another ice bear on Trafalgar Square on Friday and hopes to recycle the bronze sculptures to repeat the stunt at the Winter Olympics and in Moscow, Beijing and Sydney.
Despite their best efforts, organisers have estimated the carbon footprint of the climate summit at 40,000 tonnes of CO2 – enough to power a small city for the duration.
A total of 15,000 delegates and 5,000 journalists are accredited for the conference, although many will not turn up until the negotiations hit their critical phase with the arrival of ministers next week, followed by their leaders on the final day.
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The Bella congress centre on the outskirts of Copenhagen where it is being held is powered by two wind turbines, although they do not produce enough energy to keep all the plasma screens, computers and coffee machines going inside.
Denmark prides itself on its energy efficiency, however: it has the lowest carbon intensity of any EU state. Since 1980 its GDP has increased by 78 per cent but it has managed to keep its carbon emissions stable. Since 1990 they have fallen by 13 per cent.
To offset all the extra greenhouse gases being pumped out as a result of the climate summit, the Government is financing the construction of 20 brick-making kilns in Bangladesh, which will cut 100,000 tonnes of C02 emissions a year.