Cold Comfort

The outcome of the G-8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland has been very much on expected lines on both the key issues of poverty alleviation in Africa and global climate change.

While, prima facie, some progress seems to have been made on combating poverty through the commitment to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010, all that the climate change issue has got are a few soothing words.

Indeed, the aid commitment to Africa, too, has been well below expectations, with the total assistance still falling short of the rich countries' 35-year-old promise to contribute 0.7 per cent of their national income to the fund for international development.

But the real disappointment is on the critical issue of fighting global warming, which can prove disastrous for the world economy because of the threatened increase in the frequency of droughts, floods and climatic extremes.

In fact, the heads of the five rapidly developing countries, including India and China, invited especially to participate in the deliberations on climate change, do not seem to have made much difference to the progress on this front.

The G-8 communiqué contains no targets, timetables or committed funding to address global warming. The only redeeming feature is the assertion in the declaration that climate change is a serious long-term challenge (not considered so earlier at least by US President George Bush), and that the developed nations have the responsibility to act on this front.

The summit declined to embrace British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal for promises of sharp reductions of pollutants that cause global warming, and he had to be content with a compromise that ensures a new round of talks on climate change in November that would include the developed as well as the emerging economies.

This has, obviously, provided cold comfort to the environment campaigners. What is more disconcerting is that the US, the world's biggest polluter, still refuses to fall in line with others in agreeing to the emission reduction commitments outlined in the Kyoto agreement.

Under the circumstances, the developing countries cannot be expected to be fully satisfied with the gains from the G-8. No doubt, India and the other G-5 nations present at the Gleneagles meet did make an attempt to seek the rich nations' commitment to bear the cost of induction of clean technologies in the developing world, but that hasn't met with much success.

Their bid to seek relaxations in the intellectual property rights regime to facilitate wider adoption of cleaner technology also met with the same fate. Of course, the summit's outcome must be viewed in the backdrop of the London blasts, which not only shook the world but also impacted the G-8 deliberations.

As a result, Tony Blair, summit chairman, could not perhaps do as much as he could have to achieve something concrete on the climate change issue. All eyes would now be on how the negotiations on climate change shape up when they are resumed.