LIMA: India seems to have fallen behind its BASIC partners in its engagement at the current round of climate talks in Lima. Though the BASIC—Brazil, South Africa, India, and China—continue to co-ordinate their positions at the current round of climate talks, there is a marked difference in each country's engagement in the negotiations.
While China, South Africa and Brazil have each chosen to engage proactively in an effort to protect their development space, India appears to be without a plan with which to engage countries and help fashion the new agreement to be inked in Paris next year.
All four countries maintain that the negotiations and any new agreement must be in keeping with the principles laid out in the 1992 Convention, which stress on equity, differentiation to ensure that developing countries can meet their development needs such as poverty eradication. "We had a meeting of the BASIC today, and we are all agreed that differentiation between developed and developing countries must remain," said Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar.
With barely a year away from Paris, the chorus of demands for effective action from the more vulnerable partners within the developing countries bloc, like the Least Developing Countries and Small Island States, has gotten louder. The industrialised countries continued to be firm on their refusal to accept the 1992 water-tight division of the world into developed and developing. The advanced developing countries that comprised the BASIC needed to address this demand while at the same time protecting their development space.
Ahead of the Lima round, China announced its plans to not increase carbon emissions beyond 2030, it signaled that it was ready to go beyond its obligations as a developing country and take a proactive role in the global effort to tackle climate change. A move that ensured it would not be blamed for failure to arrive at a consensus decision at Lima. But none of the other BASIC partners are in a position to announce a peaking year, given the development constraints.
Brazil and South Africa have come forward with proposals that attempt to find way to balance development needs of developing countries, the historical responsibility of industrialised countries, and the need to take into account the changed global economic realities. Both efforts amplify the principles enshrined in the Convention. India, however, continues to champion the watertight division of the world.
After failing to push through its proposal to let the IPCC or a scientific body quantify the responsibility each country has to reducing emissions in Warsaw, Brazil has put forward a new proposal that seeks to balance the needs of developing countries with the changed realities. The Brazilian proposal at Lima recognizes that the industrialised countries (listed in Annexe I of the Convention) must shoulder the main responsibility for addressing climate change. At the same time, it also recognizes that over a period of time developing countries too must graduate and take on more responsibilities.
The South Africa-backed Africa Group's proposal of an Equity Reference Framework provides a measurement or assessment for the efforts each country needs to do as its share to address climate change. It takes into account among other things, historical emissions, financial, technological, and human resource capacity, development indices to measure a country's level of responsibility.
Both proposals seek to ensure that developing countries retain their development space, and takes into account the argument of changed economic realities of countries must be taken into consideration.
Not only that India has not been able to develop a instrument with which to engage other countries. In the first week at Lima, India proposed a global adaptation goal to mirror similar goal for emission reduction, in an effort to ensure political parity for efforts to adapt to climate change impacts with the efforts made to reduce emissions. But New Delhi had no clear plan on how to go about operationalising such a goal.
"It is marked difference from the early days of the BASIC, when at Copenhagen and Cancun it was India which had the proposals and plans, whether it was transparency efforts or technology mechanism. India's proactive engagement helped resolve sticky issues. Now it seems the other countries have taken a leaf out of India's book, and India has forgotten its playbook," a senior developing country negotiator said.
India finds itself in Lima with the arguments of the past, and is missing out on an opportunity to engage proactively and define the contours of the new global compact. "India is being defensive. Instead of quoting the Convention and Articles from it, India should put forward concrete proposals to operationalise equity and differentiation. Or it should engage with existing proposals to ensure that its concerns are addressed," said Sudhir Sharma, a climate change negotiations expert with Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA).
