Little progress on climate change

The G-8 summit indicated that the developing countries are yet to play a more assertive role in making richer nations agree to cut carbon emissions.

For New Delhi, the most important contribution of the G-8 summit held in Japan earlier this week was the fact that it received unstinted support for its nuclear deal with the US, which has led to a political realignment at the Centre. Among other things, the G8’s offer to facilitate the passage of the deal, which would help the Indian economy to meet its growing energy requirements, could not have come at a more appropriate moment given the tight schedule it will hav e to negotiate if the Bush Administration is to see it through Congress before it relinquishes office early next year.

While support for the nuclear deal is certainly of importance to New Delhi at this juncture, on the larger issue of climate-change the summit achieved little that is a welcome departure from the past, unhelpful stand of the G-8 countries. The summit vowed to cut emissions by half by 2050, which is much too slow a pace of progress if global warming is to be effectively controlled within the next two decades. The EU, which has hitherto backed a more ambitious target of reducing emissions by 25-40 per cent by 2020, has now pushed back the target year to 2050, suggesting a scaling-down of its drive against carbon emissions. This apart, though paying lip-service to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”, the summit declaration did not fail to call upon “developing major economies” to pursue “nationally appropriate mitigation actions” to control emissions. This veiled parity between the rich and the poor in the planet’s drive to control climate change and ensure mankind’s survival is, quite clearly, unacceptable to the developing world, a message emphatically conveyed by the five developing countries (India, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico) which attended the summit as special invitees, when they told the G-8 countries that they could not shirk their “historical responsibility” for the present state of affairs. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, was even more forthright when he made it clear that, while the present drive to use energy more efficiently would remain unimpaired, it was not possible to dilute the imperatives for attaining rapid economic growth and devote additional effort to preventing climate-change, which would effectively mean putting “quantitative restrictions on our emissions”. As Dr Singh said, to the exclusion of everything else, poverty eradication was the “first and overriding priority” for all developing countries.

What, in fact, the G-8 summit indicated is that the developing countries who were special invitees are yet to play a more assertive role in articulating the responsibilities of richer nations in curbing global carbon emissions. Such a course of action would not only be financially easy for them but would also enable the developing economies, as a whole, to continue to progress rapidly so that a commitment to contribute to controlling carbon emissions doesn’t come at the cost of improving the standard of life of their impoverished people.