Fighting climate change

The West is rapidly abdicating its responsibilities

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has sounded two sirens on global warming and the impact of extreme weather conditions. It recently predicted what most climate activists feared: That the earth’s 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise over pre-industrial levels would happen, at least temporarily owing to the El Nino factor, over the next five years rather than the originally predicted timeline of 2033-37. Last week, at the opening of its four-yearly congress among member-countries, it produced an updated report of the consequences of global warming over the past 50 years. It tallied some 12,000 extreme weather-, climate-, and water-related events over the past 50 years around the world. Those killed 2 million people and caused economic damage worth $4.3 trillion between 1970 and 2021. Though the bulk of the economic damage was seen in the US, it was developing countries that faced the human cost, accounting for nine in 10 deaths.

The recent cyclone “Mocha”, which hit Myanmar and Bangladesh earlier this month, exemplified these heightened risks. The India Meteorological Department has estimated that the country saw 573 climate disasters, causing 138,377 deaths, between 1970 and 2021, and 2,227 casualties due to extreme weather events. All this suggests that the world has less time to contain temperature increases and adjust to the changes than originally suggested. This raises the old question of how far the developed and developing worlds are prepared to collaborate to prevent catastrophic temperature increases. The prognosis looks bleak. The G7, comprising the world’s most powerful economies historically responsible for the bulk of the stock of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere, appears to be wallowing in self-complacent inaction. At the recent leaders’ summit in Hiroshima, the final communique asked all major economies to ensure that their individual emissions do not continue to rise after 2025 and reiterated claims to hit net zero by 2050, urging other major economies to do the same. The G7 claims its own emissions have peaked, implying that the bulk of the responsibility now lies with major emerging powers such as China and India, respectively, the largest and third-largest greenhouse gas emitters.

Both countries have set net zero targets in the mists of the distant future —2060 for China and 2070 for India. But the G7’s claims, too, are disingenuous. First, the cut-off year of 2025 has not been mandated by any international agreement. Second, it is difficult to understand the G7 claims of reaching peak emissions when major powers such as Germany, struggling with lower gas supplies from Russia, are covertly redeploying thermal power plants. To be sure, the EU voted to label natural gas, its principal energy source, green energy last year, adroitly easing its climate-change commitments. Second, developed countries have committed to spending just $100 billion per year in support of climate action in developing countries, a sum that is recognised as far too inadequate, given the scale of the problem. The WMO’s reports show that the climate-change time bomb is ticking rather faster than anticipated. And the continuing reluctance of the West to step up to the plate is putting disproportionate pressures on developing countries such as India. New Delhi would do well to leverage its presidency of the G20 to urge a more equitable burden sharing.