NIC Co-operates with the Climate Change Secretariat on COP-8 From Kevin Grose, Climate Change Secretariat & Sanjay Gahlout, NIC HQ From 23 October to 1 November 2002, India played host to the the 8th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Climate Change Convention provides the framework for governments around the world to take action to combat the threat of global warming caused by increasing economic and industrial activity, particularly in the North. The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) was responsible for the hosting the conference at the Vigyan Bhawan. The MoEF selected the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to provide all needed information and communications technology to support conference activities as well as a full webcast of the proceedings over the Internet. Preparations for the conference began in December 2001 with the first visit of the Climate Change Secretariat to Delhi. However, it was from February 2002 when detailed analysis of requirements and implementation plans were drawn up. Heading these missions from the UNFCCC secretariat in Bonn was Kevin Grose, Manager, Information Services together with John Kiarie, the secretariat’s Network Administrator. Dr.N. Viijayaditya, Director General of NIC lined up the ‘COP 8’ team headed by Mr. Sanjay Gahlout. Ms.J. Waller-Hunter, UNFCCC Exec. Secretary, Sh.Atal Behari Vajpayee, Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Sh.T.R. Baalu, Hon’ble Union Minister (E&F) and Mr. R. Kinley, COP Secretary Climate Change Conferences attract 5000 or more governmental delegates, observers from nongovernmental organizations, business and the media. These participants came to Delhi to negotiate on behalf of their governments or to influence government positions. As such, information and communication technology was at the very heart of the meeting. All 168 delegations to the conference used email to communicate with their capitals throughout the meetings. The secretariat’s website - http://unfccc.int - was the primary source for conference information and documents while a full on-demand COP8 webcast service provided thousands of people around the world with access to what was going on. Internet connectivity and the MAN The conference requirements provide for fast Internet access for 500 concurrent users and a stable VPN connection allowing for the synchronization of the secretariat’s Lotus Notes R5 servers in Bonn with those on site in Delhi. As well, the VPN makes it possible to transform parts of the secretariat’s LAN into a WAN. R.S. Mani, NIC internet / network team leader and John Kiarie, UNFCCC NIC undertook an analysis of the requirements based on the specifications provided by the Climate Change Secretariat. NIC proposed redundancy at all critical points. NICNET installed 11mbps (full duplex) RF along side 4 E1 lines (8 mbps full duplex) to connect NIC HQ to the Vigyan Bhawan. Participants at the computer centre in Vigyan Bhawan This enabled load sharing and by using dynamic routing it proved possible to achieve auto-failover. Finally, the gateway router was configured in fully-redundant mode. A third level backup was also prepared - a VSAT link of 256/512Kbps. NIC put in place a pure link to the Internet with redundant gateways and capacity of 10x10mbps, and all running the BGP4 routing protocol. Kevin Grose, Information Manager for the UN checks the arrival of first PCs on the site Vigyan Bhawan gets its first LAN 320 PCs, 42 printers, and 10 servers, all provided by NIC were combined with 5 servers, 50 laptops, a 10 station photo-ID badge production system and various scanners and CD writers provided by the UN. All were connected to over 580 network nodes installed in both the main Vigyan Bhawan building, its Annexe as well as temporary structures that served as the Registration Hall. Given the scale of the requirements, the MoEF agreed early on to permanently network the entire Vigyan Bhawan, including the installation of a fibre optic backbone. This upgrade puts the Vigyan Bhawan on par with other international conference centres around the world. Cécile Camenen, UN production coordinator, A. Rathore, NIC HQ The MAN between the NIC and the Vigyan Bhawan was connected through a gateway router in the Vigyan Bhawan. All nodes were connected to the core switches (working back to back) using 37 distribution switches. Redundancy was provided to the core switches as well as UPS services. All nodes were connected using 100mbps to the distribution switches. VLANS were configured to provide necessary security and a reduced collision domain. Installations were organized by the NIC. Two hundred United Nations staff and a complement of 180 local staff were on site to support the conference proceedings, prepare documents and assist participants. During the meeting 2 million pages were printed or copied! Staff were accommodated in existing and temporary offices in the Vigyan Bhawan and its Annex.While the UN staff were on duty, so too were the thousands of participants. All 100 PCs in the computer center were in use from 0800hrs to 2200hrs every day. While the media centre was equally busy with 30 PCs connected to the Internet and even a special ‘plug ‘n play’ centre (using phone cards from MTNL) provided laptop users with dial-up. The National Informatics Centre had responsibility for supporting the WAN/MAN/LAN connectivity, conference servers and participants network and computer centres. UN staff from the Climate Change Secretariat had responsibility for accessing and synchronization of data between Bonn and Delhi, management of the UN network and provision of support to UN staff. NIC webcasts to the world The Climate Change Secretariat (unfccc.int) has been webcasting the proceedings of conferences and other meetings since the famous Kyoto meeting in 1997 which attracted 14,000 participants. With up to 6 concurrent live language streams - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, the demands for climate summits are high indeed. The NIC webcast team worked with the UNFCCC Information Services team on a full webcast programme for COP 8. The programme included live concurrent webcast from two halls and in two languages over the conference Intranet. From the public website, all streams were archived and were available on-demand. In addition, special events were recorded by Doodarshan on Betacam tapes and were then published over the conference Intranet and Internet. Doordarshan provided the facility to convert Betacam/SP tapes to digital files for encoding. The UN provided technical specifications for the webcast production and database design. These were implemented by NIC that was responsible for technical implementation of the project and hosting the live and on-demand services. UN staff coordinated the programme production and post-production data transfer to Bonn. Audio and video signals were provided by Doordarshan. Doordarshan organized for 3 fixed camera positions in the plenary hall as well as the Press Conference Room in hall 6. 3 ENG crews were on site too for ad hoc filming in any other room. The COP 8 information and communications technology project drew on expertise and services across the broadest spectrum of technology in the market today. Satellite communications services, leased line and radio connections, firewalls and network servers, client hardware and software applications as well as a global webcast were all required to make the COP 8 a success. These resources were then combined through an extensive planning and coordination process. The Ministry of Environment and Forests, the UN Climate Change Secretariat and NIC worked closely together for nearly an year on the project. Work moved forward during three UN technical missions to Delhi, follow-up video conferences and planning meetings between NIC and MoEF. In addition, there were consultations with the Central Public Works Department. The CPWD is responsible for the buildings of the Vigyan Bhawan. The UN Climate Change Secretariat is pleased to have had the opportunity to work with the MoEF and the National Informatics Centre on this conference project. The project provided an excellent opportunity to work together, share ideas and experience and even implement some new technologies along the way. For further information , please contact Environment and Forest Informatics Division, NIC HQ Email : gahlout@envfor.delhi.nic.in For queries related to Webcast, please contact Web Services and Multimedia Applications Divison, NIC HQ Email : wsmad@hub.nic.in NIC at COP8 The COP 8 IT team -UNFCC Secretariat IT Staff together with NIC staff Neeta Verma, NIC webcast project leader V. Pasricha, B.K. Das, John Kiarie, A. Goel, P. Vinod. L to R: V. Pasricha, A. Kumar, N.Ahmed, R.K. Pathak, S. Gahlout, L. Kanotra, R. Gaikwad, P. Chand Anil Kumar, Dr. N. Vijayaditya, Sanjay Gahlout, R. K. Pathak UN information services staff at work in their temporary conference offices