Extempore equanimity
In an unprecedented move, Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh announced on Wednesday at the Cancun Climate Change Conference that India was open to legally binding commitments for its domestic actions to combat climate change. At the plenary of the 16th Conference of Parties on Climate Change, which concluded yesterday at Cancun, Mexico, Mr Ramesh said: “All countries, we believe, must take on binding commitments under appropriate legal form.” It made clear that India was also agreeable to international supervision for its voluntary domestic commitments on climate change. India has always maintained, as it did at the Copenhagen conference last year, that its domestic actions on mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHG) are purely voluntary in nature and non-binding. China, which has recently overtaken the US as the largest GHG polluter, accounting for 22 per cent of global emissions, has also taken a similar position. The US is now second with 19 per cent and India third with five per cent. But the point is, India’s per capita emissions are one-twentieth of the US.
However, the USA has been demanding a legally binding commitment from emerging powers, particularly from the BASIC group, in which India is a member along with China, Brazil and South Africa. This the BASIC countries have refused, on the very sound reasoning that most of their people do not lead energy-intensive lifestyles, and no commitments are possible till a basic level of livelihood and infrastructure is guaranteed to each citizen. But the minister’s statement would now open up the country to international monitoring and verification of its domestic mitigation action, which has always been stoutly resisted both by people’s organisations and governments of developing countries globally. Earlier during the summit, the minister had proposed international consultancy and assessment (ICA), which urged developing countries with over 1 per cent of global GHG emission to report and get their emission reduction actions verified by international experts. But it met with stiff resistance from other BASIC members when it was presented in the group meeting.
The most interesting aspect of Mr Ramesh’s new proposal is that it was not part of his prepared speech, which he was to read at the plenary, but was made completely extempore. In 17 years of climate talks, India and other developing countries have always held that global warming is a problem caused by rich countries, and it was up to these countries to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions first.
In fact, the statement appears to be a departure from Ramesh’s mandate given by the Union Cabinet last week, which said that India should not agree to any legally binding agreement at this stage, stick to second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol and no absolute emission cuts. India has maintained that its domestic mitigation commitment, made as part of the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, with which 140 countries associated, was purely voluntary in nature and not binding.
The problem is, the European Union and the 40-strong group of island nations, backed by the US, circulated a proposal to replace the existing Kyoto Protocol with a legally binding instrument for all countries, for what they called long-term cooperative action (LCA) to combat climate change. The proposal was backed by 70 nations, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Maldives from South Asia, and said that the new instrument should be agreed in the next climate summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2011. Mr Ramesh’s reasoning is that if India doesn’t agree, it will be isolated. He has admitted that the move is in response to pressure from industrialised countries, applied through the poorest of the developing countries and those most vulnerable to climate change effects. So, is the UPA government slowly but systematically re-aligning India’s climate change policies with those of its new ‘friend’ the United States of America?
