Sunday, November 29, 2015

Why India must push for a climate deal that is both just and ambitious by Ipsita Chakravarty (scroll.in)

                                                      CLIMATE CHANGE

[India will be one of the worst affected by rising global
temperatures. Extreme heat already kills hundreds in summer, the smog
over North India thickens with every winter and mortalities related to
air pollution have soared. Cycles of drought and flood have wreaked
havoc in the agricultural lands. In a hotter world, millions living in
the floodplains and coastal areas will be displaced.
...
But curbing climate change is not a luxury anymore and unless urgent
measures are taken, it could disrupt the government’s favoured
development narrative as well. The deal that India pushes for in Paris
should be equitable as well as ambitious. There is no reason that
climate justice has to stand in the way of climate change mitigation.]

http://scroll.in/article/771967/why-india-must-push-for-a-climate-deal-that-is-both-just-and-ambitious

CLIMATE CHANGE

Why India must push for a climate deal that is both just and ambitious

Cracking down on climate change is not a luxury anymore.
Ipsita Chakravarty  · Yesterday · 12:30 pm

A sampler of the headbutting likely to take place at the United
Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris next week: US Secretary of
State John Kerry recently told the media that India was a “challenge”
to the climate regime taking shape because of its “restrained"
attitude to the “new paradigm”. No such thing, shot back India's Union
Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar. India was not a blocking
country and would do its fair share, but the developed world needed to
vacate “climate space” first.


Already, the conversation on global warming has fallen into
predictable oppositions: climate change mitigation versus climate
justice, the developed world versus the developing, richer countries
of the G20 versus poorer nations of the G77+China. In this round,
India has emerged as the prime crusader for climate justice, leading
the charge for the developing world. Its actions will set the tone for
the other developing countries of the G77, and the Global Solar
Alliance mooted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi could create a new
sphere of influence when it comes to negotiations.


But as it pushes for a more just process of negotiations and
regulatory framework, India must recognise the need to act quite
drastically against climate change. It’s not just a first world
problem.


Down with history


Kerry and his cohort have been sniffing righteously about an
“ambitious” climate deal in Paris and claim India could spoil the
party. There is of course this little detail: the international
community has not even been able to make good on previous,
less-ambitious climate deals and has long backed out of the
commitments made in the relatively modest Kyoto Protocol. Since the
Paris deal will not be legally binding either, there is no reason as
yet to believe it will fare any better than its predecessors.


There is another detail that developed countries seem to have skipped
and India has pointed out. An ambitious agenda for climate change, in
this case, means abandoning the principles of justice that have shaped
deals over the past two decades. The principle of common but
differentiated responsibility was evolved in the Rio conference of
1992 and endured through Kyoto 2005. It recognised that most of the
environmental degradation witnessed today has been caused by 150 years
of industrialisation. The older industrialised nations of the West
were more to blame, the common sense ran, and it was for them to clean
up their mess. Common but Differentiated Responsibility combined this
notion of historical responsibility with a country’s individual
capacity to act against climate change. Poorer, developing countries
which needed to grow fast to meet their domestic needs could not be
expected to prioritise climate change concerns, while richer countries
were able to bear the costs of mitigation.


The first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which
came into being in 1994, had just 20 countries committing to emission
cuts. These countries, mostly rich, were also to help others in
meeting their climate change goals. Things started changing after the
Kyoto Protocol, which the US refused to ratify, insisting that global
warming could not be controlled unless China, Brazil and India, all
big ticket polluters, also agreed to cut emissions.


Rich nations' club


The first draft of the new UNFCCC seems to reverse the principles of
the older agreements and has upset Indian negotiators. It throws out
the notion of differentiated responsibility and stipulates heavy
emission cuts across the board. The projected cuts are likely to
affect developing countries disproportionately, costing them about
$790 billion a year. Yet the draft does not show a way to bridge these
inequities. It does not say how the developed world will fulfil its
responsibility to help poorer countries cope with the demands of the
new deal, both financially and through sharing clean technologies.
Indian negotiators have also claimed that the draft ignores the
suggestions made by developing countries, is inimical to domestic
interests and projects a consensus when there was none.


It is not just the contents of the draft agreement that are
problematic to India, it is also the decision making process.
Recently, India stalled an attempt by the G20 to “pre-decide” the
contours of the Paris deal in a pact outside the formal negotiation
process. All decisions, Indian negotiators insisted, should be taken
at Paris, where every participating country has an equal say.


It is difficult, at this juncture, to resist clichés about imperialism
and neocolonialism in describing both the draft and the preliminary
meetings. They reek of regressive “first world” bullying, of an
outdated attitude that assumes it is perfectly fine for a clique of
rich countries to take the moral high ground, decide what is best for
the international community and formulate a game plan that involves
minimum cost to themselves, or at least, to the US.


The Climate Action Tracker, for one, has rated India’s “Intended
Nationally Determined Contribution”, or proposed commitments to
mitigation, considerably higher than the US’s, just below the European
Union and China’s.


Climate change is here


In Paris, therefore, Indian negotiators will have to fight for a more
equitable agreement. But the politics of a climate change deal cannot
detract from the vital need to have an agreement with teeth.


***India will be one of the worst affected by rising global
temperatures. Extreme heat already kills hundreds in summer, the smog
over North India thickens with every winter and mortalities related to
air pollution have soared. Cycles of drought and flood have wreaked
havoc in the agricultural lands. In a hotter world, millions living in
the floodplains and coastal areas will be displaced.*** [Emphasis
added.]


The Indian establishment has traditionally regarded climate change a
secondary concern, to be postponed until more pressing problems of
growth and development were met. And in spite of its grandstanding
abroad, this government’s domestic record on environment does not
evince much confidence – in a rush to ease up regulatory bottlenecks,
it has cleared infrastructure projects indiscriminately and in a bid
to attract investors, it has diluted environmental safeguards. The
draft Environmental Laws (Amendment) Bill 2015 focuses on extracting
monetary penalties from polluters instead of making them clean up.


***But curbing climate change is not a luxury anymore and unless
urgent measures are taken, it could disrupt the government’s favoured
development narrative as well. The deal that India pushes for in Paris
should be equitable as well as ambitious. There is no reason that
climate justice has to stand in the way of climate change
mitigation.*** [Emphasis added.]


No comments: