The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference is currently being held at the Expo City in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The event is commonly referred to as the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UNFCCC, and this year’s edition is the 28th of its kind.

The event started on November 30 and is expected to come to an end on December 12. According Carbon Brief, a UK-based website that specialises in the science and policy of climate change, more than 97,000 participants were given badges to attend this year’s conference. This is almost twice the number of participants that attended the 2022 edition that was held in Egypt.

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Delegates attending COP28, as this year’s edition is fondly called, have been categorised into two groups: the party delegates and the overflow delegates.

The party delegates are negotiators and delegations of countries, while the overflow delegates are representatives of civil society organisations, media and business persons.

The UAE, the host nation, accounted for the most number of delegates with 4,409 participants, while Brazil followed with 3,081. Nigeria and China are joint third with 1,411 attendees each.

Nigerians on social media have since slammed the federal government for the country’s large delegation to the conference. Many of them have deemed the decision of the government to sponsor the trip of most of the delegates as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

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Interestingly, Nigeria has more delegates in attendance than world powers like the United States of America and Britain, who have attended the conference with 770 and 697 delegates respectively.

Below is a list of all the 195 countries in attendance and their number of delegates.

LIST OF COUNTRIES AND THEIR NUMBER OF DELEGATES

Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino are the only three countries without delegates at the ongoing conference.