UN Climate Negotiations Costing $150 million Annually

U.N. climate negotiations have siphoned off more than $150 million a year, according to economist Richard Tol.

The cost of United Nations climate summits have ballooned in tandem with the carbon dioxide emissions officials are trying to restrain, according to estimates put together by environmental economist Richard Tol.

Tol estimates that the costs U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) annual negotiations exceed $150 million in the last three years.

Estimated costs of UNFCCC meeting and global CO2 emissions pic.twitter.com/gVnpTFNTAr

— Richard Tol (@RichardTol) October 29, 2018

The U.N. is also convening an increasing number of climate meetings compared with the late 1990s, according to Tol. However, the costliest negotiations are the annual summits known as the Conference of the Parties (COP).

“If anything, this is an underestimate,” Tol told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

To estimate the annual costs of U.N. climate talks, Tol multiplied the number of meetings by the length of each meeting, the number of participants and travels costs and salaries for government workers.

For example, Tol estimated U.N. climate talks cost about $200 million in 2015, the same year delegates met to hash out the Paris climate accord. Climate negotiations the following year cost slightly more, according to Tol, a professor at the University of Sussex.

That’s a massive increase in costs compared to 1995, the year of the UNFCCC’s first COP summit held in Berlin, Germany. Tol estimates negotiations only cost around $20 million that year. (RELATED: Has Trump Embraced The ‘Lukewarmer’ View Of Climate Change?)

The 1995 meeting had fewer than 800 attendees, according to Tol. Compare that to the 40,000 attendees planners expected at the 2015 Paris summit. To accommodate the crowd, the U.N. held the summit at a 45-acre site that included, 32 negotiating rooms and a press center for 3,000 journalists.

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