INDIA’S NEGOTIATOR SAYS CLIMATE TREATY TALKS ‘PARTIAL SUCCESS’

[But many environmental activists saw the 2013 talks as a bust since no specified amount or timeline has been set for rich countries to actually give the money for losses and damages, and neither is there a specific plan to capitalize the $100 billion Green Climate Fund, which will help developing nations adapt to climate change.]

By Betwa Sharma

Janek Skarzynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A session in progress at the 19th conference of the United Nations Framework 

Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland, on Friday.

WARSAW, Poland  — After more than 35 hours of continuous discussions, Ravi Shankar Prasad, one of India’s lead negotiators, described the United Nations climate change conference as “a partial success” for keeping the pathway open for a global climate treaty to be finalized in 2015.

Mr. Prasad said that after being on the verge of a breakdown, the talks, which concluded Saturday, delivered a mechanism for developed countries to give money to poor nations for climate-related “loss and damage” and created an outline for a system under which countries could make “contributions” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after 2020, when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty on climate change, will end.

“Loss and damage is something African countries have been asking for 15 to 20 years. It was very close to their heart and so were keen on it,” Mr. Prasad told India Ink on Saturday night, as delegates of several countries rushed out of the National Stadium in Warsaw to catch their flights after the talks had been extended an entire day.

Last week, the failure to reach agreement over loss and damage had led to a walkout by the bloc of developing countries called G77 & China, which also includes India.

For itself, India sees any future money for losses and damages to be utilized for building sophisticated risk resilience mechanisms that warn against natural disasters.

But many environmental activists saw the 2013 talks as a bust since no specified amount or timeline has been set for rich countries to actually give the money for losses and damages, and neither is there a specific plan to capitalize the $100 billion Green Climate Fund, which will help developing nations adapt to climate change.

As old arguments dragged on, a large group of activists handed in their badges and walked out of the conference on Thursday to express their anger over the lack of progress.

Even the issue of global emissions was stalled until the last hours of the conference, when delegates of 189 countries agreed to an amendment proposed by India and China to change the word “commitments” to “contributions” in paragraph 2b of the text, which forms the basis of the new climate treaty.

The running joke in the negotiating halls was “2b or not to 2b.”

Since India is still faced with the massive challenge of increasing development for poverty eradication, Mr. Prasad explained that only developed countries would have legally binding “commitments” as they were responsible for historical emissions.

The Indian delegate said that it was not for developing countries to “fill the gap” left by the failure of rich countries to take on 40 percent reduction targets over 1990 levels, targets that had been recommended by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or I.P.C.C.

Presently, the European Union’s reduction figure in the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period, which runs until the new treaty kicks in 2020, is only 20 percent from 1990 levels. The United States, which never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, has pledged a 17 percent reduction from 2005 levels.

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which put the burden of cutting emissions on the shoulders of rich countries, the 2015 treaty will be “applicable to all,” as was agreed to in the Durban Platform decided at the 2011 talks in South Africa.

But dividing responsibilities remains fraught with contention. “Clearly, there is a difference from the past, but what exactly that is not yet decided,” said David Waskow, director of the International Climate Change Initiative in Washington, D.C.

India, for instance, would have preferred “actions” in the text to “contributions” to refer to its voluntary domestic actions to reduce emissions. The country is also not willing to sign up for international obligations until it gets the technology for its implementation.

Asked when India would change “contributions” to “commitments,” Jayanthi Natarajan, India’s environment minister, said, “Why should it be changed to ‘commitment’? Developed countries should first show their commitment.”

Ms. Natarajan stressed that developed countries had to increase their emission reduction pledges under the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. “I only see with dismay that they are cutting down on their pledges,” she said.

Countries like Russia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand have not signed up for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, and Tokyo has also lowered its emission reduction target to 3.8 percent from 2005 levels, which in effect is a 3.1 percent increase in emissions from its 1990 levels.

The Philippines’ negotiator, Yeb Sano, who had fasted for the duration of the conference to highlight the suffering from Typhoon Haiyan in his country, said that India “had played a very important role” in retaining the principles of “common but differentiated responsibilities” included in the 1992 Rio Declaration.

On the other hand, the recently released Global Carbon Project finds China (27 percent) and India (6 percent) to be among the world’s four largest emitters of carbon dioxide, along with the United States (14 percent) and the 28-nation European Union (10 percent).

The report said that China accounted for 70 percent of the global increase in 2012, while India was 7.7 percent. It also found that the United States still had highest per-capita emissions at 16 tons, compared to seven tons in China and 1.8 tons in India.

While India’s per-person emissions were low now, the British climate economist Nicholas Stern in a recent conversation with India Ink said that even while grappling with poverty eradication, the country needed to think 20 years ahead.

“India’s emissions would be something like 12 billion to 13 billion tons of CO2, while the world budget in 2030 would be 32 or 33. So there is no way the world could achieve that,” he said.

Mr. Waskow said that India had a responsibility to act, although not as much as others, including some developing nations. The climate expert suggested different types of contributions that are linked more closely to development goals, like increasing the use of clean energy.

“Rather than maintaining a rigid notion of countries in two separate cabins, it can be helpful to think of them and the actions in a more holistic way,” he said.

Already, some of the most vulnerable island nations and African countries are looking for major emitter developing countries like India and China to do more to combat climate change.

Acknowledging that the very existence of some countries was at stake, Mr. Prasad said, “We always say that we will do more than what they are doing. But that doesn’t mean that we have to do as much as developed countries. There is a difference.”

Some climate change activists, however, expressed concern that developed countries were gradually diluting their own responsibilities, while developing countries had lost their grip on keeping equity as a strong pillar in the climate talks.

Chandra Bhushan, deputy director at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, suggested that India should strengthen its negotiating stance “to operationalize equity,” by securing its share of the carbon space left in the atmosphere.

The fifth I.P.C.C. report finds that the atmosphere can accommodate only another one trillion tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the end of the century if the rise in the global temperature is to be limited to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This has to be now apportioned between countries,” said Mr. Bhushan. “Now the time has come for India to take a lead in this.”

Betwa Sharma is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

@ The New York Times