NEW DELHI: How ambitious are the emission reduction targets rich nations are ready to adopt for 2020? Pretty low, suggests a technical report that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has prepared. The report is based on compiling the offers developed countries made after the Cancun summit last year.
Take the case of the US. It has offered to cut its emissions by a mere 4% below 1990 levels. This too is predicated on developing countries like India,China, South Africa and Brazil willing to make similar commitments. Even for this meagre and conditional target, the US wants to take advantage of the cheap carbon credits it can purchase from developing countries instead of taking actions at home, which would more expensive and also impact lifestyles.
But all this is also not a firm commitment from the US. It has informed the world that it might alter these targets based on what its Congress decides in the future. Also, there is no time frame when a final figure would emerge.
Compare this with the target of 35%-40% reduction developing countries had demanded from rich countries to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.
The US might have made one of the worst offers, but even the other rich nations are also willing to reduce their emissions by only 13%-18%. And almost all of these countries have put pre-conditions, demanding developing countries give commitments and open their economies to international scrutiny.
But look at how this would set the world up for an unequal sharing of atmospheric space. By 2020, if the US sticks to even this meagre offer, its citizens would enjoy per capita annual emissions of 16.8 tonnes, while an average European would enjoy 7.7-8.8 tonnes per capita and an Australian 15.7-19.9 tonnes per capita. The rubric of commitments rich countries are asking developing nations could limit India at below 3 tonnes per capita for eternity.
This is not a new data. It has been floating informally for a while, but this is for the first time that the UN climate secretariat has analyzed it to show what kind of global regime is on offer.
The offers could bode ill for emerging economies with the world having committed to keeping temperatures from rising more than 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrialization era. This has rendered a de-facto upper limit on total global emissions. Now, if the rich countries do not take on a fair share of their responsibility, the burden for the rest would fall on developing world by default.
That's why, the emerging economies have been fighting hard not to let an explicit global cap on emissions be brought in unless the rich countries first spell out how much share they are ready to bear and if it's proportionate to their historic emissions or not.
