INFOCUS | INDIA-CHINA | ENVIRONMENT | COVER STORY
Caught in DEVELOPED & DEVELOPING WORLDS
semantics
Climate change is a matter of justice. The richest countries caused the problem, but it is the world’s poorest who are already suffering from its effects. In Durban, the international community should have committed to righting that wrong. But instead it got caught with semantics. |24| India-China Chronicle
B
efore the Climate Talks began at Durban in December, 2011, it was speculated that the country groupings will have a major role to play towards a constructive outcome at the seventeenth Conference of Parties (Cop 17). It was understood that the Durban outcome would largely depend on the interplay among the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), the EU and the much larger group of developed countries led by the US and comprising Russia, Japan, Canada, Australia and others who have been historically been opposing legally binding carbon reduction commitments. The BASIC group has always maintained that it cannot be treated on an equal footing with the developed countries on emission cuts because of its ‘developing world’ status. At the same time it would not let go off the US and others to share a greater responsibility for their historic emissions responsible for the current climate crisis. However, post Cancun, the EU and others in the developed country groups have been increasingly asserting that ‘all emerging economies’ should take legally binding emission cuts. With green house gas emissions increasing five times faster in China, making its per capita emissions close to Western Europe, South Africa’s emissions being even higher than China, and India and Brazil having low emissions comparable to the world’s poorest countries but rising at an accelerated
five times higher than its earlier emission rates, BASIC represents a group where its emissions, put together, are growing much faster than the world’s. Based on such statistics, the pressure on BASIC has been to accept obligations identical to those imposed on the North. Those in the group, especially India and China, have been resisting this pressure on the principles of equity and Common but differentiated liability (CBDR). Brazil and South Africa howevr were ready to accept binding obligations in return for finance. But China and India responded to such pressures by adopting voluntary measures and country specific Climate Action Plans for reducing carbon emissions intensity of their GDP by 40-45 per cent and 20-25 per cent respectively by 2020.
Shawahiq Siddiqui Advocate in the Supreme Court and is part of the team drafting the Renewable Energy Law
Of Kyoto and Climate Debt The Kyoto Protocol is the world’s only effective document that provides for binding emission cuts. Kyoto differentiates between the North and South’s responsibility for climate change and mandates that the North, responsible for 75 per cent accumulated emissions, repay its climate debt. It imposes a modest five per cent cut of its 1990 level on the global north. Kyoto’s effective early phase—‘first commitment period’—that imposed mandatory emission cuts ends in 2012. The Annex 1 countries
April 2012 India-China Chronicle |25|