Best giveaways at CoP15 so far

IFAW had some stuffed tigers that were going quick and fast - I think every delegate with a child under 10 had those snapped up before anyone else even had a chance. The CITES/Doha baseball hat moved less quickly. Hats off (see what I did there?) to WWF's Gemma Parkes who organised the International Herald Tribune's 'Tuna Edition' (above left).

But CLEARLY the best giveaway/prize/tschoke, the one that everyone is talking about, is the 'SIZE DOES MATTER' bag for Coralliidae (above) by yours truly. It's in reference to the fact that last time, at CoP14, the red and pink coral proposal was narrowly (and nastily) defeated because, among other reasons, the FAO analysis decided that there were plenty of red and pink corals in the sea and that population numbers were fine! When actually, the science shows that colony size has declined to the point that 80-90% of individuals (ie polyps, the reproductive elements of the coral) have been lost.

The official CITES delegate bags hold, among other things, a box of dates, a bunch of Doha postcards, a converter (score), a pen by Pew Environment Group (wonder how they managed that?), all the CITES CoP15 documents (amounting to a few saplings) and a partridge in a pear tree...