CLIMATE CHANGE AND INDIA
Who’s Looking at the Climate?
US, Europe and China have clear plans based on carbon budgets, the new currency of climate change talks. How about India ?
IT WAS LARGELY DECIDED IN THE WEE hours of the morning, after intense discussions, only a few hours before the report was released. Late last month, the Inter-governmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) meeting in Stockholm announced a carbon budget for the planet, a maximum amount of carbon dioxide the world can emit without inviting dangerous climate change.
On the surface it seems like a simple correlation: human beings can emit only another 350 giga tonnes of carbon dioxide if the warming has to be within safe levels of 2 degree centigrade. However, a lot of intricate science went behind this calculation, and it is set to lead to even more intricate political wrangling in the next two years.
The concept of a carbon budget has been around for at least a decade, but it is the first time IPCC has given a number and announced it in strong terms. This budget will form the basis of climate talks from now on, which will culminate in a global treaty to be signed in Paris in December 2015. This new basis is actually advantageous for India, which otherwise has been steadily losing its position in climate talks. However, the government has little time to formulate a clear strategy in terms of carbon budget. “There is a small window to articulate our point of view in the climate talks if we want to shape an agreement for 2015,” says Navroz Dubash, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research.
The Need For A Plan
There is a strong reason why IPCC introduced this concept now. Our understanding of the climate system has improved tremendously over the last decade. “In the last six years, our models have been able to link carbon emissions with temperature rise very well,” says Govindaswamy Bala, professor at the Indian Institute of Science and one of the authors of the chapter on carbon budget. Now that there is a carbon budget for the planet, climate talks will veer away from annual emissions to how to share the budget. “The evidence for warming is so strong that governments can no longer be complacent about it,” says Krishna Kumar, professor at the Indian Institute of Meteorology in Pune and a co-author of the summary for policy-makers of the IPCC report.
So the next round of talks, to continue in Warsaw next month, will focus on how this budget is to be shared between countries. This decision would depend on many factors, one of which would be the strength of a country’s arguments. This would, in turn, depend on a clear development and decarbonisation plan prepared by its government. For India, with low accumulated emissions, it is a better deal than one based on annual emissions. But while China, the US and Europe have good plans based on carbon budgets, India is yet to develop one, say officials who have been part of negotiations in earlier climate talks. “If we are silent on the carbon budget issue, we will not have something to put on the table during the talks,” says Mukul Sanwal, former lead negotiator for India and executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Sanwal now teaches climate change politics at the University of Massachusetts in the US.
In the environment ministry, the joint secretary and additional secretary in charge of climate change negotiations were unavailable for comment. Calls and an emailed query to the secretary’s office remained unanswered at the time of going to press.
China Versus India
The Kyoto Protocol, signed by many developed countries in 1990, is now considered a failure as it had no impact on global carbon dioxide emissions. India had been refusing so far to be part of any deal, saying that it has development priorities that would be hurt by serious emission-reduction measures. This position is being gradually weakened over the years as other countries kept increasing the pressure on India. It does not help that climate change was never been a top priority in India, and has almost completely disappeared from the government radar in recent times.
Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary, quit his job in 2010 as special envoy on climate change. Since then, environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who had been driving India’s climate change policy, has also left the ministry. India’s team for climate change negotiations, if it exists in full, has no visible leadership.
While this is a problem, the biggest obstacle would be the absence of a study that linked the country’s development future with a carbon budget, something essential to put forth a strong case at the climate talks. “India’s climate policy has not yet fully come to terms with the carbon budget concept,” says T Jayaraman, professor and dean at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences at Mumbai. Other big emitters had recognised this idea a few years ago. In May 2011, US National Research Council had jointly produced a report on America’s Climate Choices, and it had recognised carbon budgets as a key concept. This preparedness was probably the reason why the US did not oppose the introduction of the carbon budget idea in the IPCC report.
China, with the highest annual emissions, quite clearly gained from a shift away from annual emission reductions. Climate change talks participants also say that China is thoroughly prepared to deal with the carbon budget concept. They also say that both US and China were remarkably quiet during the discussions at the IPCC meeting in Stockholm. Unless India articulates its plans clearly at least 18 months in advance of the treaty, there is no chance of it being heard loudly in these talks. This leaves the country little time to orient national development plans based on a carbon budget. China is expected to complete its major infrastructure projects by 2020, when the treaty is supposed to come into effect. India’s infrastructure development still has a long way to go, and therefore much to lose from a treaty forced on it.
An expert group headed by Kirit Parikh, set up to develop strategies to reduce carbon intensity of the GDP by 25% by 2020, is yet to submit its final report even after three years. In the end, even such reductions may fall far short of the requirements—from a climate change point of view—if the GDP grows well during the next decade.
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