NEW DELHI: The developed countries have refused to share a portion of the profits they make from the international carbon trade to replenish a fund meant to help poor and developing countries adapt to climate change.
With the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting ending in Poland on a bleak note, the Indian delegation has come back livid with the fact that rich nations blocked all attempts to provide adequate money to the Adaptation Fund.
At present, 2% of the cost of carbon trade between developing and developed countries is put in an Adaptation Fund, which is serviced by the World Bank. Developing countries had demanded that a percentage of the proceeds from carbon trade between the rich countries too be transferred to this fund.
At the moment, the fund amounts to a mere $60 million.
Worse still, in a round-table meeting of ministers of different countries, developed nations tried to break the rules of the existing convention and do away with the basic principles of equity and `common but differentiated responsibility'.
The convention, recognising that the industrialised countries were primarily to blame for the crisis, imposes a greater responsibility on them to cut back their emissions. The discussions in 2008-09, it was decided in December 2007 by all countries, would be restricted to how to enhance emission reductions of the industrialised nations and not to force poor and developing nations to also take commitments on reduction.
But the minutes prepared of the high-level round-table instead carefully left out mentioning these two phrases while suggesting that all countries including India had agreed to create a new treaty. India took note of the move and protested strongly in the meeting.
"The US per capita accumulated greenhouse gas emissions stand at 1,100 tonnes and India's at 23 tonnes. Other industrial countries are also to blame for such high levels of emissions but at Poznan, they tried to quietly work to rewrite the convention which rightfully puts the onus on them to act," said an Indian official back from the Poland meet.
Officials pointed out that pressure would only increase in the coming year to break the convention and rewrite its provisions. They said a meeting of heads of governments could be on the anvil by year-end if the deadlock continued between the rich and the developing countries where the guns would all be targeted at India and China on one side and US on the other.
