Did West bend India on climate?

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Did West bend India on climate?

Nitin Sethi | TNN

New Delhi: Has India blinked in the climate change negotiations? This seems to be the case as at the Major Economies Forum meeting in Italy, India has gone back on some of its key principles — like a refusal to accept emission caps — that it held to be non-negotiable till just before the G-8 meet in Italy.
In the course of some tough negotiations, India appears to have bent a bit in the face of pressure from industrialized countries, and the biggest compromise at the MEF was to accept that all countries would work to reduce emissions in order to not let global temperatures rise more than 2 degrees above pre-industrialisation levels.
When this declaration, signed by PM Manmohan Singh, is turned into targets for different countries, this may imply substantial emission reduction targets for India even if rich countries take a hefty 80% cut in their own emissions by 2050. While an 80% cut is the most ambitious target ever considered for the developed world, India and China would still be faced with large cutbacks.
Till date India has insisted that the science behind 2 degree target has been questioned even by the UN climate science panel. It has demanded that unless rich nations put figures on the table about what sort of reductions they were willing to accept collectively by 2020, and then again by 2050, India would not agree to any commitments for the long term which the 2 degree agreement places on them.
CARBON CLIMBDOWN
India’s initial stand: Unwilling to accept carbon emission caps, insisted that all monetary assistance to developing countries to check emissions be routed through UN; not ready to allow scrutiny of indigenously funded climate change projects
At the last meeting of Major Economies Forum (MEF) in Mexico, India refused to budge on these issues
At G8 summit, India said it had agreed to relent on these issues as the MEF declaration was only a ‘political’ statement and US prez Barack Obama clarified it was not a ‘negotiating forum’
In best-case scenario, India has given away bargaining chips. It might now be under pressure to agree to carbon caps under the goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees by 2050India’s hands tied after MEF pact acceptance
New Delhi: On the acceptance of Major Economies Forum (MEF) declaration, several Indian observers told STOI, would tie India’s hands as it goes into talks at the formal UN negotiations. India for the first time has officially agreed that there is a global target and it may now, in due course, spell out what it will take to reach it. Now the global target of emission cuts instead of equity would become the over-arching argument in the negotiations, an observer explained.
Another clear giveaway by India, observers point to, was agreeing to put its entire set of climate change activities up for international scrutiny. Till now, India had stated that only those actions that are backed by measureable, reportable and verifiable funds and technologies from rich nations would be up for international scrutiny. “If they don’t pay for it, why should we allow them to act like big brother and watch over our spending from our own funds,” is how an official explained the position earlier, calling it an issue of sovereignty.
India has also agreed to the idea that it would take actions that would bring its emissions down from business-as-usual in the mid-term (read by 2030). India has claimed, and its own as well as World Bank studies have shown, that even on businessas-usual lines, India’s per capita emissions in 2030 remain far below those of rich nations at present. Hence, it has no reason to take further actios if it is already on a low-carbon pathway.
But, observers say the mention of using per capita emissions based calculations as the basis of dividing responsibilities found no mention in the MEF declaration that the Indian PM signed. The word equity which India has always embedded in its arguments also found a weak mention in passing.
On the issue of providing finances and technologies too, India gave away more than it got, observers noted. Till date, India claimed — and the Bali Action Plan laid out — that developing countries would reduce their emissions only if they were enabled by tech and fund transfer. This has been watered down in the MEF statement and now such actions would only be ‘supported’. “The word ‘enabled’ meant that actions would only be taken when the money was on the table, ‘supported’ implies we would take actions and the money and funds would come at a later date; the trigger value has been lost,” said one expert.
Till the last meeting of the MEF at Mexico, all these issues had been nonnegotiable items on the table from India. So much so, that the negotiations for the MEF statement ended in a stalemate with India being one of the main countries opposing any text it considered inimical to its interests.