12th Petersberg Climate Dialogue

… informal political discussions. Since then it has established itself as a milestone in international climate diplomacy. Environment ministers from over 40 countries accepted the invitation from the German minister to the 12th edition of the Dialogue, which was held in the form of a virtual conference at the beginning of May 2021. Discussions focused on preparation for the COP 26 global climate change conference to be held in Glasgow in Scotland in November 2021. The PCD was supplemented by a series of virtual, public satellite events on a variety of climate protection issues held in advance of the event itself.

The organiser and its service providers had the task of making sure remote participants had the same diverse and interactive experience as they would have had with a normal offline event. A further goal was to make transmission of the two-day event platform-neutral and barrier-free for all participants and viewers. Special attention was also paid to the different user groups: high-level speakers, ministers, delegates and the public received different user privileges and, as a result, different content in the live feeds.

To make sure that all viewers around the world had a reliable livestream, we programmed an HTML website on the basis of our B4 system. The short lead time of just four weeks to realise the project as well as the above-mentioned special privileges system, including encryption, were just two of the tough challenges facing our team. A further task was the integration of additional external platforms such as Twitter, Slido and other streams into our centrally managed website.

Some of the 40 countries joining in the conference were moved to separate “private rooms” in order to achieve the best possible HD video quality using the video conferencing tool requested by the client. This enabled numerous one-to-one virtual sessions, brought together in the video control unit in Berlin especially equipped for this purpose. This gave us the flexibility to show and hide each participant as appropriate. We could adjust the size in which each participant was displayed, allowing us to provide each participant with constant HD picture quality.