Insalubrious climate for reform

COP31 is up against all-round failures

Next week, leaders of 90 countries will converge in the salubrious “Turkish Riviera” town of Antalya for the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (called Conference of Parties 31, or COP31). However, the idyllic setting is not expected to yield much good news. It is already clear that the 2015 Paris agreement target to hold increases in global average temperatures below 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels is unlikely to materialise. In November last year, the United Nations Environment Programme’s “Emissions Gap” report suggested that global temperatures would breach the lower threshold of 1.5 degrees centigrade within the next decade, far faster than climate advocates had hoped, thanks to accelerated fossil-fuel burning. The report points out that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any point in the last two million years. So even if countries lived up to their Nationally Determined Contributions — and the report is doubtful on this score — the world will warm by 2.3 to 2.5 degrees centigrade by the end of the century. 

Faced with this disastrous scenario, the effort in Antalya is to limit peak warming to a “low overshoot path” of 1.7-1.8 degrees centigrade before cooling to 1.5 degrees centigrade in 2100. This will require considerably higher emission-cutback pledges than those made in Paris; given that the world has already warmed 1.44 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, only an unalloyed optimist can hope to reach those targets. Beyond unchecked fossil-fuel burning is the sustained reluctance of the developed world, which is responsible for global warming in the first place, to underwrite urgently needed mitigation and adaptation projects in the climate change-impacted poor and developing world. The United States’ repudiation of the Paris Agreement set the trend in Donald Trump's first term as President and his second stint saw the mass exit of private finance from climate-funding initiatives. 

Much has been made of the fact that climate finance has crossed $2 billion annually. But this amount lags annual requirements of $7.8 trillion till 2030. The bulk of this meagre finance goes into mitigation projects (such as renewable energy and emission reduction) that have revenue-earning potential, leaving little for adaptation programmes (such as infrastructure to contain sea-level rises) needed in scores of island-nations and countries with long coastlines. Climate-finance meetings ahead of Antalya did not suggest a fundamental alteration of this funding paradigm or amount. 

India has consistently outperformed its Paris Agreement commitments. It exceeded its non-fossil-fuel electric-power target nine years ahead of schedule and its emission intensity reduction 10 years ahead, and is on track to create an additional carbon sink. This track record has given New Delhi the confidence to set challenging targets for Nationally Determined Contribution for 2031 to 2035. These are creditable achievements that also go a long way towards reducing India’s fossil-fuel dependence. But these developments must be weighed against steady ecological destruction, which also plays a role in climate change. Diminishing biodiversity in the Western Ghats and other Indian forests for mining and commercial plantations, for example, unchecked construction in the Aravallis, the indiscriminate building of dams and railways in fragile terrain in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and the disastrous pollution of the oceans are all trajectories that will eventually annul the achievements of the Paris targets. They, too, need to be addressed with the same urgency as emission norms.