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Won’t accept prescriptive messages on climate goals: India at Bonn talks
India intervened during a technical dialogue on the Global Stocktake on Tuesday to make its point.
India will not accept prescriptive messages from the Global Stocktake scheduled to take place at this year’s UN Climate Conference (COP28) on what national determined contributions should constitute.
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At the ongoing climate conference in Bonn, seen as a run-up to the COP28 meeting later this year in Dubai, India and other developing countries demanded that the Global Stocktake be guided by the principles of equity and historical responsibility.
The Global Stocktake (GST) is the process for reviewing the implementation of the Paris Agreement and its goal of keeping global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to keep it under 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
India intervened during a technical dialogue on the Global Stocktake on Tuesday to make its point.
At Bonn, parties are expected to end technical discussions and set the tone for the political messages on the GST ahead of Dubai. At e current levels of emissions, the world is way off the mark from the Paris Agreement goals, and, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, headed for 2.7°C warming.
The World Meteorological Organisation on May 15 warned that there is a 66% chance that annual global surface temperature will temporarily exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one of the next five years. In the backdrop of these projections, the COP28 Global Stocktake (GST) has to not only inform the wide gap in emissions reductions needed globally, but also get political consensus to put the world back on track for the Paris Agreement.
In the context of what the GST should entail, India said: “We would not support any prescriptive messages from the GST on what the content of our NDCs should be. Parties under the Paris Agreement retain the sovereign right to determine their climate targets in pursuit of their goals, and reflect them in their NDCs. In this context, we do not support that NDCs necessarily should be economy-wide, comprising all sectors or gases. Those that would like to frame their NDCs in this manner, voluntarily have our full support.”
India’s intervention was reported by the Third World Network (TWN), a non-profit international research and advocacy organisation focusing on North-South affairs which and confirmed by the union environment ministry on Wednesday.
The environment ministry said that India has also flagged other issues related to equity and historical emissions. “We share the concerns raised by others regarding lack of operationalising equity in our dialogue so far, on pre-2020 gaps, the depletion of the global carbon budget due to disproportionate use by a minority, and the severe constraints and costs that this imposes on low-carbon development, in developing countries.”
Referring to the IPCC scenarios on global mitigation pathways, India emphasized that “the models and scenarios currently in the scientific literature have not received the close scrutiny necessary to determine whether developing countries’ needs, rights and aspirations are anywhere close to being met by their projections. These models provide pathways that are based on constraining energy consumption and income growth in developing countries, and project a future for us that we do not want.”
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TWN in their briefing from Bonn stated that the G77 and China led by Cuba also flagged GST must enable Parties to look backwards at their contribution to the climate crisis. This includes implementation gaps related to the pre-2020 timeframe (Kyoto Protocol period), historical contribution of developed countries to emissions since the pre-industrial era among others.
“The reflection and operationalisation of equity; reflection of the best available science; the importance of the provision of means of implementation from developed to developing countries to enhance their climate actions; contextualising collective progress and ambition on sustainable development, the right to development, and the eradication of poverty in an integrated and holistic manner; the progress in implementation and ambition in, and the linkages between mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, response measures, and the means of implementation,” G77 and China demanded.
The US did not agree with calls of integrating historical responsibility in the GST. According to TWN, US stated that GST is a collective assessment of the Paris Agreement (2015) and not the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which entered into force in 1994) and that equity did not have a single definition but multiple dimensions.
“Developing countries are saying that historical responsibility should be acknowledged because not acknowledging it means the mitigation burden will be redistributed among developing nations who did not contribute to the problem. It’s also important because for developing countries to take on mitigation burden equally large amounts of finance is needed. This issue will be big in the coming days,” said Harjeet Singh, head of Global Political Strategy, Climate Action Network International.
On Wednesday, COP28 President, Sultan Al-Jaber met European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans to discuss preparations for COP28 to be held in Dubai from 30 November to 12 December.
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In a joint statement, they agreed on critical elements in the run upto COP28. These include: urging all Parties to “align their national efforts with the shared commitment to achieve the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement, including to pursue efforts to keep global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.” They also agreed on ensuring the completion of the first Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement that informs climate action going forward to set out pathways to achieve emissions reductions, enhanced resilience and finance flows that are aligned with climate neutrality objectives (net zero emissions); progressing towards a just energy transition that includes a scaling-up of renewables in particular, and policies and investments to transition towards energy systems free of unabated fossil fuels; operationalising the fund to address loss and damage in vulnerable countries among others.
