India’s complaint: Climate text biased

India’s complaint: Climate text biased
Draft In Favour Of Rich Countries, Neglects Carbon Pie Equity Sharing: Experts
Nitin Sethi | TNN

New Delhi: Taking a privately expressed grouse to the formal level, the Indian climate team on Tuesday officially complained on the first day of the negotiations at Bonn that the negotiating text included elements that would alter the character and content of the international compact — the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Though couched politely in the genteel language of international diplomatic engagement, the statement from the Indian team stopped short of being accusatory in nature. It insinuated that the authors of the negotiating text (a base for all future negotiations) had bent the draft in favour of countries that want the key parts of the convention rewritten.
The Indian government also detected a move in another subsidiary body of the convention to twist the convention and put India on the mat.
India, like other non-industrialised countries, is expected to periodically communicate its actions to prevent climate change and the possible threats from the inevitable changes to the UNFCCC. But Indian officials saw a move in time to make the information sharing — known as the national communication — a mandatory exercise and allow other countries to scrutinise and evaluate it.
With the UN negotiations broken down into several subsidiary body meetings, the Indian delegation has been stretched to look out for convention-bending statements or tactics by industrialised countries.
The industrialised countries, wanting to get India, China and other emerging economies to also take greenhouse gas (GHG) reducing commitments, require to reinterpret and reinvent parts of the UNFCCC because at present the compact doesn’t allow this.
India insists that the negotiations are only to enhance the working of the existing convention and the subsidiary bodies, and that their chairs and others have not been empowered to consider any issue that could lead to alteration of the existing global deal.
It uses the agreement reached in 2007 in Bali to back its position. In Bali, the 181 member countries of the convention had agreed that they would look at enhanced action under the convention and its several pillars but would not alter the character or content of the convention. The Indian delegation has told the negotiators that: “AWG (the subsidiary bodies dealing with long term goals) has no mandate to entertain proposals that are in conflict with the Convention... Any proposal that is not in conformity with UNFCCC should, therefore, be excluded from future versions of the negotiating text.”
It pointed specific holes in the draft text, which work like traps and snares for developing countries and reduce their negotiating space.
The Indian submission protesting the imbalance reads: “The question of stabilisation (either of greenhouse gas concentrations or temperature rise) is inseparably linked to the question of an equitable allocation of the global atmospheric resource.” The Indian experts believe that the draft focuses primarily on a global unified target for GHG reductions.