Analysis: Growth of Chinese fossil CO2 emissions drives new global record in 2023
Provisional totals suggest that 97,372 delegates have registered to attend the COP28 summit in Dubai in person. With a further 3,074 attending virtually, this takes the overall total to 100,446.
As the chart shows, this comfortably makes the Dubai event the largest COP in history. For comparison, the first climate COP – held in Berlin in 1995 – had 3,969 delegates.
Last year’s COP in Sharm El-Sheikh received almost 50,000 delegates, which put it some distance ahead of the 38,000 that attended COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. It highlights a trend of increasing participation at climate COPs following a dip in attendance after the peak of COP21 in Paris in 2015.