Selected Articles from Various Newspapers & Journals
A climate more congenial to India
Is the Paris Agreement on climate change a good or bad deal for India?
Efforts at international cooperation imply that countries
must concede something with the intent of obtaining some greater gain. The
premise of the climate agreement is that by agreeing to some checks on national
greenhouse gas emissions, and hence energy use patterns, each country benefits
from decreased collective exposure to harmful global climate change. Most Indian
analyses of the Paris Agreement have focussed on the concession — what did India
give up? But since India is a country at great risk from climate impacts, a
balanced reckoning requires a close look at both sides of the ledger, the loss
and the gain.
On the loss side, India’s long-standing objective in climate
talks is to avoid undue limits on energy options. This is important, as India
will require a great deal more energy in the coming decades: for commercial
cooking fuels, access to electricity, and power for industries and commerce to
provide livelihoods. Although huge, these needs are also uncertain; much depends
on how India grows, and on how technology changes. This uncertainty also makes
negotiation difficult, as it is hard to know how much to bargain away without
causing harm.
The bedrock of India’s approach to ensuring we do not give
away our energy future is the principle of “common but differentiated
responsibility and respective capabilities” embedded in the underlying Framework
Convention on Climate Change. Without this safeguard, all countries would have
been placed on the same footing. India, despite contributing little to the
problem and having limited capacity to address it, would have been placed under
undue pressure to prematurely limit emissions. Developed countries have long
argued for a dilution of this principle, saying that the world has changed since
1990 when the Convention was negotiated —particularly referring to the rise of
China — and that static lists of developed and developing countries fail to
capture this dynamic global context.
This deadlock was broken at Paris by acknowledging that the
world has indeed changed, yet not so much that these categories are no longer
relevant; developed and developing country categories are retained but made more
fluid. Moreover, the Agreement usefully specifies what the principle means in
practice for key climate policy areas such as mitigation, adaptation, finance,
and transparency provisions. In this respect, India demonstrated some nimbleness
at Paris, by shifting from arguing for blanket invocation of the principle to
seeking its specific application in key areas.
For example, in the core mitigation area, the Agreement
states that developed countries should take the lead with economy-wide emission
reduction targets, while developing countries should aspire to do so over time,
recognising that they will need to grow their emissions. This allows some
countries to cross categories when it deems fit, as China has done by pledging a
“peaking year” for its emissions, while allowing other, like India, to persist
with an emissions intensity pledge, which allows emissions to rise.
Significantly, it maintains a distinction between developed and developing
countries in the provision of climate finance, using the same model of creating
a somewhat porous boundary. This distinction retains a key idea for India —
expectations of mitigation actions by developing countries are related to
expectations of support from developed countries. Together, retention of
categories of countries and their operationalisation in key provisions ensure
India’s losses at Paris are limited. An important caveat is that what was a
relatively impervious boundary has been made permeable, increasing the risk that
India will be pressured to ‘voluntarily’ cross that boundary sooner rather than
later.
Union
Public Service Commission (UPSC) aspirants staged a protest near Parliament
House on Monday demanding compensation in the form of additional attempts, which
they say they lost due to a discriminatory Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT)
paper during the preliminary examination.
