COPENHAGEN, Denmark — When more than 15,000 delegates travel from around the world to Copenhagen, Denmark next month to hammer out a new global treaty on climate change, the bulk of those travelers will, somewhat ironically, be hiking up their carbon footprint through their travel to the event.
But a new partnership announced last week by Cisco aims to bring even more people to the conference minus the added greenhouse gas emissions from travel.
Cisco's Global Climate Change Meeting Platform (GCCMP) will tie the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to more than 100 locations around the world, bringing potentially thousands of additional attendees to the event.
"The deployment is part of the Danish government's commitment towards making COP15 as environmentally friendly and collaborative as possible," Svend Olling, the head of the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement. "Cisco TelePresence will give delegates attending the conference the ability to meet with colleagues, experts and advisers around the world who can provide them with the counsel and information they need when considering a potential agreement."
The GCCMP will tie four TelePresence suites at the Copenhagen summit to 100 additional rooms located around the world, including 75 already-existing Cisco TelePresence rooms, 20 Danish embassies around the world, and United Nations offices in Germany, Switzerland, Nairobi and New York City.
Providing TelePresence to Copenhagen delegates -- with the dual effects of saving travel costs and cutting an organization's travel-related emissions -- neatly echoes the primary reasons for the growing adoption of virtual meeting technologies.
Companies including Deloitte and Tandberg have announced such plans recently, and Cisco itself estimates that its 650 TelePresence units have cut over 180,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions to date.
Last year, Cisco worked to expand the market for TelePresence by introducing a TelePresence solution for SMEs, while Hewlett-Packard earlier this year added its low-cost Skyroom suite to enable virtual meetings for almost any workstation.
The adoption of virtual meeting solutions has long been touted as an easy way that current technologies can cut global emissions, and is one of several types of technologies that have been dubbed "Green IT 2.0," or the use of technology to boost energy efficiency and reduce emissions far beyond an organization's hardware and software IT infrastructure.
More details about the GCCMP, as well as a full list of locations that will be tied in to Copenhagen and instructions on how to schedule a virtual meeting during the Copenhagen climate summit from December 7 to December 18, are online at the COP 15 website.