UN climate change talks: Global warming negotiators can’t stand the heat

Temperatures are rising at the UN's climate change summit in Peru, where delegates complain their overheating venue is harming deliberations

They are, according to energy secretary Ed Davey, “the most complex negotiations the world has ever undertaken”: representatives from 190 countries attempting to draft an unprecedented worldwide deal to tackle global warming.

But the near-9,000 delegates attending the UN’s climate change summit in Peru have found they also have a more local warming problem to contend with: the venue is too hot.

Sweltering temperatures inside the meeting halls have prompted many delegates to complain that the temporary buildings are generating their own “greenhouse effect” – with one Zimbabwean representative at Monday’s opening plenary reportedly even suggesting it was “too hot to work”.

With temperatures in the mid-seventies outside, the mercury has hit more than 86F in some of the halls, which have been specially-constructed on the site of the Peruvian military headquarters in Lima.

“3 days in & it’s still crazy hot. How can they expect any smart decisions to be made in these conditions?,” Yong Ly, a delegate observing the talks for the P3 Foundation anti-poverty group, wrote on Twitter.

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