Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Senior officials met at Bharat Mandapam on Monday and the ministers follow on Tuesday. The interesting part of a chairship is not the communiqué — it is which four subjects a host puts on the agenda.
India, chairing BRICS in 2026, hosted the grouping’s Environment Working Group of senior officials at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on Monday, together with the Contact Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. The 12th BRICS Environment Ministers’ Meeting follows on Tuesday, presided over by the Union Environment Minister, Bhupender Yadav, with an outcome document and thematic sessions on the table. The chairship’s stated theme is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”.
Four priorities have been placed at the centre of the environment track: sustainable lifestyles, afforestation, forest fire management and disaster resilience. Read as a set, that is a deliberately practical list. Each of the four is measurable, each is something a national government can act on without waiting for a global financing agreement, and each is a subject on which India has domestic programmes it can put on the table rather than only positions it can argue. The Working Group itself was created in 2015, at the first BRICS environment ministers’ meeting in Moscow, as a forum for exchanging practice rather than negotiating obligations — and the agenda India has set stays firmly within that character.
The venue: Bharat Mandapam at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, where the Environment Working Group and the Contact Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development met on 17 August ahead of the ministerial on 18 August.
Forest fire management is not a glamorous agenda item. It is one of the few on which five countries can actually exchange something useful this year.
At a Glance
• Host: India, chairing BRICS in 2026
• Venue: Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi
• 17 August: Environment Working Group, senior officials
• Alongside: Contact Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development
• 18 August: 12th BRICS Environment Ministers’ Meeting
• Chaired by: Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav
• Chairship theme: Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability
• Priority one and two: sustainable lifestyles; afforestation
• Priority three and four: forest fire management; disaster resilience
• Working Group created: 2015, first ministers’ meeting, Moscow
Forest fire management is the item most likely to produce something usable. It is a domain where satellite detection, alert dissemination and community response can be shared as protocols rather than as pledges, and where the participating countries between them hold a very large share of the world’s fire-prone forest. Afforestation carries a similar logic: the difficulty in every member country is not planting but survival rates three and five years on, and a common reporting convention for survival — rather than for saplings planted — would be a genuine contribution from a host that has run large plantation programmes and knows where the measurement problems sit.
The realistic expectation from a two-day meeting is a text, not a transformation. But a chairship is an agenda-setting instrument, and India has used it to steer a grouping often preoccupied with finance and trade towards four environmental subjects where practice can move faster than diplomacy. If Tuesday’s outcome document commits members to a shared measurement standard on even one of the four, the meeting will have earned its place in the calendar.
