Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The UN climate summit, COP30, which began on November 10 has a packed schedule for the Brazilian hosts. As many as 145 agenda items – ranging from questions of cutting greenhouse gases, financial help for poor countries, rights of Indigenous peoples, boosting clean energy and preserving the world’s forest – are to be decided over two weeks. With the US out, squabbles among nations, bombast and competing national interests are only part of the story. Nature is giving its own account.
Outside the air-conditioned conference halls, temperatures are rising fast, and for two years have breached the relatively safe limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial level that nations had vowed to keep. The evidence of climate breakdown is gathering fast. Scientists have warned that the first of a series of ‘tipping points’ – the bleaching of ocean corals – already appears to have been reached.
At the heart of COP30 are two key questions. First, what can the world do to stop global heating accelerating further and faster? And secondly, can it be done in time to prevent unstoppable catastrophe? Brazil’s presidency of COP30, the ‘conference of parties’ under the UN framework convention on climate change, is focused on the developing world, and the host’s top priority is to try to preserve unity amid stark global divisions.
Some call it the most consequential COP since the signing of the Paris Agreement 10 years ago. At Paris, countries set out national targets on curbing or cutting greenhouse gas emissions but failed to hold to the 1.5C limit the treaty stipulated. Six years later, at COP26 in Glasgow, they pledged to cut projected temperature rise further. With temperatures climbing faster, those revisions have to be urgent and deep at the COP30.
The world, undoubtedly, requires a more than faint-hearted approach to salvage confidence in multilateralism to ensure that humanity’s common causes are won. Sadly, the concept that ‘we are stronger together’ is facing the gravest crisis since World War II. The surest manifestation of this is Trump’s policies, like his belittling of the climate goal or forsaking of the global tax frameworks.
India has rarely been found lacking in such global commitments, despite its unique development challenges as the most populous country grappling with a relatively high incidence of poverty. India’s Ambassador to Brazil said in Belém that India has met its nationally determined contribution target five years ahead of schedule. At the same time, it is rapidly adopting and indigenising green energy of assorted kinds and taking steps to cut their costs, while calibrating the phasing out of fossil fuels.
There can be no denying that climate risks are alarmingly real. Addressing them is the most commonsensical of all things, and vital for the world’s sustainable development and preventing it from being uninhabitable. The global policies to mitigate climate risks have been grossly sub-optimal. Europe’s pledge to make itself the first net-zero continent by 2050, for instance, is inspiring, but pales in comparison to India’s resolve to achieve the feat by 2070, given the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. As India has strongly argued, the real difference will have to come from bridging the yawning gap in climate finance available for developing countries and minimising the harm from environmental depredation to the most vulnerable.
