Good and bad news

COP27 does not push forward India's agenda significantly

The two-week-long 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — COP27 — has come to an end. As expected, it ran somewhat overtime, with delegates agreeing on an “implementation plan” at dawn on Sunday. The Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan — named after the Egyptian resort town where the conference was held — does not, however, advance the anti-climate change agenda as much as it was expected to do. The big new development is what is known as “loss and damage”. Essentially, the principle that those who are the greatest victims of climate change are owed some form of support was eventually agreed upon.
 

The acceptance of the principle of “loss and damage” by the international community follows three decades of demand from small island-states and the least developed countries, or LDCs. However, COP27 has pushed down the road to COP28 any plans for who receives and who pays such money. The price for getting the United States and some other rich countries to sign on to this proposal is that the group of contributors to the fund will be expanded beyond the developed world. In other words, the US has made the case that countries like China and big fossil-fuel exporters in the Gulf must contribute. For India, this development is objectively a net negative. First, there is no reason to suppose that India — although one of the greatest victims of climate change — will be selected as a recipient of any “loss and damage” money. The Indian economy is simply too big for it to be considered. Second, there is a very real fear that this financing will come at the cost of other forms of climate or development finance, of which India is currently a recipient. The agreement specifies that “existing funding arrangements” can be repurposed for loss and damage payments, and this threatens flows to India.

What has India got out of the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, then, if it has signed up? One of the government’s priorities going into this conference was adaptation —altering economies, lifestyles, and infrastructure to protect humans from the negative effects of a changing climate. There were no major advances on this agenda, but some signs of hope. Attempts to create a clear definition of what adaptation is and how its goals can be measured — an important first step to, for example, private financial flows into adaptation finance — may have moved forward slightly. India’s other big plan was to protect its coal usage by expanding the efforts of past COPs to extend the reduction in coal usage to oil and gas. There is some good news and some bad news here. The bad news is that India was not able to create this extension because it was blocked, among others, by strong objections from fossil-fuel producers such as the Gulf countries and Russia. The Saudis, for example, stated in public that they do not believe that the fight against climate change even required “phasing down” the use of oil and gas. Observers noted that the Egyptian COP presidency made an enormous amount of space available to oil and gas producers to make their case; there is an obvious link to Cairo’s dependence on Riyadh for aid. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates together promised the Egyptian government as much as $22 billion in aid earlier this year. The good news is that a reasonable number of countries — and even the European Union — agreed in principle to this stand, and so India was not necessarily seen as a blocker. This is a pleasant change from past COPs, and reflects a newly constructive approach in New Delhi.