A disappointing G20

Its failure to agree on climate casts a shadow on COP26

After two days of tense negotiations, the leaders of the Group of 20 nations finally agreed on a joint statement that highlighted the fight against climate change. Yet, as a consequence of continued intransigence by several members of the G20, the final statement was a signpost for relative failure rather than success. The headline pledge was to bring an end to the international financing of coal-fired power plants. Even there questions will be asked about the degree to which this pledge will affect plants that have already been planned. The commitment to climate neutrality for domestic economies was vaguely specified as being “about mid-century”. No agreement was reached on the domestic use of coal. Nor did the G20 effectively demonstrate greater ambition than was displayed at the Paris climate summit six years ago.

US President Joe Biden put the blame squarely on Russia and China, large emitters that failed, which, he said, “basically didn’t show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change”. Mr Biden, interestingly, did not name India, which also has a large domestic coal sector but has sought to increase the footprint of renewable energy in the economy, subject to the availability of financing. The impasse at the G20 takes on special significance in the light of the rapidly approaching UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Conference of Parties at Glasgow, generally abbreviated COP26. Many hopes have been attached to the summit, the first major such gathering in two years, and which comes amid ever-strengthening evidence that global warming is causing serious climatic disruption across the world. The host country’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, warned that the pledges signed on to by the G20 were mere “drops in a rapidly warming ocean”, and said they put the COP summit in jeopardy.

COP26 is supposed to break out of the current impasse by pushing climate finance as a solution, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggested at the G20 that developed nations set a target of providing 1 per cent of their gross domestic product as finance for green projects in emerging economies. He underlined the injustice of pressing the developing world for greater climate ambition without measurable progress on mobilising climate finance. The prime minister suggested the collation of a clean energy project pipeline that could be financed by developed-world money, alongside the creation of a clean-energy research network across the G20 and the outlining of standards related to green hydrogen.

Mr Modi’s argument could be framed not just as a question of justice but indeed as a question of necessity. Even with the best will in the world, many developing countries will fail to find greener development paradigms without ample transition finance being provided. Thus COP26’s focus on finance takes on additional importance. Yet the broad failure of the G20 summit to raise effort levels on climate change is not a good sign for COP26. The fact is that most of the emissions come from the G20 countries. Here also are the holdouts to broader agreement — Russia, China, and Australia, among others. A solution at the multilateral or UN level can happen only if the G20 is broadly on board in advance — and that does not seem to have been the case.