Mark Gongloff, Columnist

Do 70,000 People Really Need to Be at a Climate Confab?

The expanding crowd risks overshadowing the purpose and turning the meeting into another celebrity-studded gathering of rich people.

November 30, 2023 at 10:00 AM UTC

By Mark Gongloff

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Is COP Man devolving into Davos Man?
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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How many people do you think it takes to hammer out a global climate agreement? 500? 5,000? 50,000?

Apparently, the correct answer is 70,000. That’s about how many people are expected to turn up in Dubai over the next few weeks for COP28, the latest United Nations climate confab, which starts on Thursday. This is up from 49,704 at COP27 last year in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and 38,457 at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. Attendance has more than tripled since 2019. In COP’s early years, attendance averaged just 5,000.