Individual attendance data for over 30 years of international climate change talks

The international community has formally negotiated over climate change since 1991. The annual meetings that host these negotiations have seen an ever-growing number of individuals representing countries, international organizations, or non-governmental organizations. These meetings and their attendees have accordingly become the focal point of international climate change cooperation for both the international community and scholars studying climate change politics. Yet, researchers have been unable to access and analyze comprehensive attendee-level data pertaining to these negotiations in terms of attendees' names, genders, job titles, delegations, divisions, and affiliations. In applying text-as-data techniques to attendance roster PDFs, we extract and build attendee-level datasets for all annual negotiations held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its precursor, 1991-2023. These data include original language and English-translated information on 27,470 unique delegations and 310,200 attendees over a 32-year period. Summaries and validations in turn highlight the promise of our data for the study of attendance patterns and characteristics across delegations and over time.