After ratification: Writing and reading the climate change rules for 4 years

India has finally decided to ratify the Paris climate change agreement on October 2. This was the easiest part. Now comes the grind.

The agreement is expected to come into force by 2016 now. But it will be implemented starting 2020. The commitments given under the Paris agreement for emission reductions, finance and other issues are all for the period starting 2020. Between now and 2020 all the countries will negotiate the rules and regulations of the Paris Agreement. And, these are crucial. In order to stitch together an agreement at Paris, decisions on many of the rules and regulations were postponed in 2015. These will all need to be put in place and resolved in fine detail by 2020.

Work on these rules, regulations and decisions begins formally on November 8 this year with the meeting of 196 countries at Morocco. The global media attention may be low this time but the stakes would remain as high.

One of the key ask for coming years is to devise a template against which countries can fairly and honestly report their actions and be measured against their commitments to reduce emissions and provide finance – the latter commitment is only for the developed countries. In 2015, an OECD report claiming climate finance commitments were being substantially met by rich countries got exposed for its creative accounting and proved that a lot of fiction can be passed off as facts if transparency is not established.

India, not awaiting the political decision for ratification, has already set in motion the steps to meet these challenges. Five inter-ministerial groups have been set up looking at what India needs to do to meet its international climate commitments in future. It will probably require a law or regulatory regime to be put in place for all private entities to report their emissions.

Such a law is being actively thought of. Industries and their associations as well as civil society will need to actively engage in this process.

The government will also need to set in place a mechanism for a realistic assessment of how much finance and what type of finance is available for its low-carbon or clean coal endeavours.

  

India had drawn up an internal assessment of its energy requirements by 2030 in light of its greenhouse gas emission intensity reduction targets but this will now need to be put down as part of the long-in-waiting energy policy of the NDA government. It will have to come with explicit understanding that endeavours such as the International Solar Alliance are faltering and that India’s electrification challenges cannot be papered over with semantics and smart presentations.

It will also need a realistic assessment of how much coal India needs and how much it can extricate in the next 15 years from under its forests on a realistic basis for its energy needs – the resource is not just a revenue generator for the state exchequer. There is a cost of resource extraction that the country pays in terms of disenchantment in central Indian tribal belts and as a multiplying public-health crisis.

Between now and 2020, the attention on the international climate negotiations is going to dip within and outside the government. But this is the time to keep all eyes at it, as the fine print negotiated over the next four years could either strengthen or further weaken an already feeble global agreement. The fine print could also put restrictions on Indian growth and its endeavours to find a low-cost transition to clean energy – the placeholders for which the Indian government failed to remove from the Paris Agreement when negotiating last year.