Saving Durban

Need to take forward the agenda of previous summits

Like the previous two international climate summits at Copenhagen and Cancun, the upcoming United Nations-sponsored meet at Durban, beginning today, too, is unlikely to deliver a consensus-based globally-binding successor to the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which expires in December 2012. However, the conference may manage to avoid the stigma of failure by showing progress on some peripheral, though not insignificant, issues directed at taking the climate change mitigation process forward. The key hurdles in extending the Kyoto pact for a second commitment period, or evolving an alternative to it, include divergent, and often conflicting, agenda of different countries, high economic costs of green development, and domestic political compulsions. If the stance taken by different countries in the run-up to Durban on the critical issue of mandatory targets for slashing greenhouse gases is any indication, there seems little room for convergence of opinion.

Countries like Japan, Canada and Russia have voiced their unwillingness to endorse a fresh deal unless the largest polluter, the US, and some rapidly developing countries, notably China, also take on legally enforceable emission reduction obligations. Even the European Union, which has been the front runner on climate action, is toeing more or less the same line. Most developing countries, on the other hand, insist that rich nations, which have damaged the environment over the past century to cause global warming, should not only take effective remedial measures themselves but also shoulder the economic burden of clean development elsewhere. The US, which had opted not to sign the Kyoto pact, seems to be reluctant even now to accept globally mandated emission-slashing goals and commitments for funding climate mitigation action due to its domestic economic compulsions.

India, which has voluntarily launched an elaborate national climate action plan, is also disinclined to take on binding and internationally verifiable emission-reduction targets, arguing that it has already walked the extra mile and expects the developed countries to do so by making higher and unconditional commitments under Kyoto-II. Abandoning the flexibilities it displayed in the past couple of years, New Delhi has reverted to its original stance of insisting on common but differentiated responsibilities as enshrined in the Kyoto pact. With this subtle, but significant, move, India has once again aligned itself with developing countries, though its credibility as a reliable partner and a spokesperson of their concerns has been dented. To restore this, at the Durban talks it will have to strongly advocate the principles of equity and its historical responsibility of alleviating global warming.

However, regardless of the fate of the Kyoto successor, the Durban meet can make some worthwhile advances on some other proposals on the table, such as the Green Climate Fund, Voluntary Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. These are part of the unfinished agenda of the previous climate summits. The optimism about a positive upshot on these plans emanates from the fact that most countries have by now realised the perils of climate change and the need for collective effort to ward them off. The world is already witnessing frequent spells of aberrant and hostile weather, marked by unprecedented droughts and floods, and perceptible changes in global ecology and biodiversity. The economic consequences of such calamities are colossal. It is, therefore, in the interests of all to arrest, if not reverse, the menace of climate change.