Last-minute 'climate change', India drops two-year-old policy

In an effort to break a deadlock in negotiations to save the planet from overheating, Union Minister of State Jairam Ramesh discarded overnight India’s policy of two years on global climate change. Chetan Chauhan reports. Jairam's full interview | Volte face | Cancun vs Copenhagen | Possible agreements

Updated on: Dec 10, 2010, 08:28:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Cancun, Mexico

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In an effort to break a deadlock in negotiations to save the planet from overheating, Union Minister of State Jairam Ramesh discarded overnight India’s policy of two years on global climate change.

It’s a move that will likely win India international acclaim, but Ramesh must now prepare for fierce domestic criticism of his new stand that the country is willing to accept legally binding commitments in place of its oft-repeated policy of only voluntary action to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

“All countries must agree to a legally binding commitment under an appropriate legal form,” Ramesh said as he surprised his own negotiators at the 16th global climate summit.

The statement was not part of the minister’s prepared speech, which he read at the plenary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as the summit is officially called.

The UPA had assured Parliament India’s position of refusing any legally binding agreements was non-negotiable. Last week the union cabinet accepted Ramesh’s proposal to drop the non-negotiable bit, allowi-ng him to be flexible in the resort city in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, one of the regions most at threat from climate change.

Like most developing countries, India had consistently said that since global warming was caused by developed nations, it would only offer voluntary cuts of up to 25% — not of overall emissions but in the intensity of emissions, or reducing the carbon in every unit of industrial production.

This offer was made at the non-binding December 2009 Copenhagen Accord, where 140 nations vaguely agreed to a 2-degree Celsius limit, widely deemed inadequate, to global warming by cutting emissions in half by 2050. On Wednesday, Ramesh said India would not accept absolute cuts in overall emissions.

Ramesh’s stand comes on a day when the European Union and island nations — most at risk from disappearing beneath rising oceans — backed by the US proposed the scrapping of the existing climate treaty, the 13-year-old Kyoto Protocol, which enforces emission cuts only on developed nations.

In its place, they proposed a legally binding instrument for all countries from a dialogue process called Long-Term Cooperative Action (LCA).

“Why should we have a problem with the LCA text?” the minister asked, though the LCA proposal was opposed by Indian negotiators.

Backed by 70 nations, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Maldives from South Asia, the proposal says that the replacement to the Kyoto Protocol (it ends in 2012) should be agreed at in the next climate summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2011.

“If we don’t agree, we will be isolated,” said Ramesh.

Japan, Australia and Canada have opposed extending the Kyoto Protocol, which was never signed by the world’s largest economy, the US.

A new legally binding treaty with legally binding commitments from the developed world and emerging economies such as India, China, Brazil and South Africa could pave the way for a truly global agreement, stuck in contentious negotiations over the last two years.

“We have to be flexible and recognise changing realities,” Ramesh said, while ruling out India accepting absolute mitigation cuts.

Ramesh said future discussion on legally binding commitments would depend upon on enforcement, penalties for violations and monitoring systems.

The minister has already proposed an international regime to monitor and enforce these commitments. That is already part of an official UN text.

Jairam's full interview | Cancun vs Copenhagen | Possible agreements

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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