Lima is suddenly on international news! Amid hope to seal the climate deal in Paris next year, and with an appeal to the world leaders to step up their actions to deal with disastrous consequences of global warming, the annual negotiation under the ambit of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was started on December 1 at this coastal city along the South Pacific Ocean.
Throughout the next two weeks, the plenary sessions and meeting rooms with abuzz with arguments and statements in convoluted jargons and diplomatic coldness, with civil society screaming for stronger actions, business houses trying to find opportunities in emerging green economy and at times pressurising the sugar daddy parties (read: negotiators) to voice their concerns.
Last September hundreds and thousands of people marched the streets across the world to demand substantive climate action from world leaders. We have seen how Warsaw failed to deliver last year, although closely avoiding a Copenhagen-type fiasco and creating mechanism for ‘loss and damage’ that aims to rout climate change adaptation assistance to poorer countries from industrialised nations. This is merely a reconstructed version of the Green Climate Fund which had failed to fully materialise. Only a handful of resource-rich countries actually came up with offers to donate around $100 million towards this mechanism, against the GCF’s target of progressively raising annual funding to $100 billion a year by 2020.
In return, developing nations had to consent to a clause obliging all countries, regardless of their level of economic development, to ‘contribute’ to the global climate rescue effort through ‘nationally-determined’ emission cuts. It means is that the term commitments, which so far applied to targetted emission reductions by developed countries alone, now stands substituted by a watered-down contribution to curbing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. Also, emission reduction targets, which were previously determined globally through negotiations, will from now on be fixed nationally and, therefore, voluntarily.
However, how much burden each of the nations would share to save the world may be known only later in the lead up to the Paris meeting, the current gathering — called COP20 — would, hopefully, throw lights on countries’ priorities and willingness to move on low-carbon development path.
RK Pachauri, chairman of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in his opening remark, “Science offers clear rationale for climate action”. The recent scientific findings of the IPCC report predicted disastrous consequences of global warming for the world if the countries do not act fast to reduce their carbon emissions.
COP20 at Lima is the last gathering before the Paris meet in 2015, countries have to agree on a deal with new goals which will take the world post 2020. The ongoing talks, soon after the much-talked about climate deal between the US and China, seeks to set the tone for the ‘Paris Protocol’ and countries will be wrangling over their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), which they have to finalise by March next year.
The key issues at Lima will centre on emission cuts, finance (this will include finance for forests, land use and near-term mitigation potential). The synthesis report of the IPCC has made it clear that adaptation alone will not prevent the world from hurtling into a climate calamity. Countries have to focus on mitigation and their national emission cuts should reflect this aspect.
While the US-China deal is low on ambition, there is nothing preventing India from taking on ambitious cuts and opting for a low carbon path. Under the bilateral deal that was signed in Beijing last month, the US will reduce emissions by 26-28 per cent below the 2005 levels by 2025. China, on its part, intends to achieve the peaking of carbon emissions around 2030 and make best efforts to peak early and intends to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20 per cent by 2030.
In fact, the deal has set the world’s expectation from India — the third largest polluter — to come up with a credible action. Indian experts have been saying that India should set the ground for tighter emissions cuts and ambitious national action plans and there is no need to be bound by the US-China deal. India is sending a 17-member government delegation, led by environment minister Prakash Javadekar, which is set to negotiate at the talks.
The Lima round of talks will set the broad parameters of the nature of commitments India and other countries will have to take to address climate change under a new agreement, to be signed in Paris next year and implemented from 2020.