The United Nations’ 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) on climate change ended its fortnight-long conference in Doha with, as always, minimal and marginal progress. It is easy to view the results of this conference as depressing. Still, there were some minor achievements. The conference was held under the gun, as it were — the only legally binding pact on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, expires at the end of 2012. Negotiators stayed on for an extra day so that, with 23 days left, the Kyoto Protocol was extended — but gutted, with the exit of Japan, Russia and Canada, three of the world’s highest emitters of carbon-based greenhouse gases. The United States – which has signally failed to take leadership of this issue even under a president, Barack Obama, who campaigned on it in 2008 – has long failed to ratify the Protocol. Those remaining fully committed to the Kyoto Protocol, thus, are only those developed nations genuinely serious about climate change mitigation — in other words, just the European Union. It covers now only 15 per cent of carbon emissions worldwide.
The most important development at the Doha conference, however, was that the first steps towards transfers for climate change adaptation – minimising the damage from climate change, as opposed to mitigation, which is minimising the amount of climate change – from rich to developing nations were laid out. In hotly debated words, the conference agreed that at-risk nations would be given funds for the “loss and damage” caused by climate change. These funds might be as much as $100 billion by 2020. Yet they might not — because this agreement is also, in truth, an unwieldy compromise. Poorer nations rightly demand compensation for the damage caused by historical polluters in the industrialised world. The “polluter pays” principle is well established, but continues to be denied relevance in international climate talks. The United States, in particular, continuing its recent tendency to play the naysayer at important international meetings, refused to allow the word “compensation” anywhere near the final document, concerned that it could justifiably be held to account in domestic courts for its complete unwillingness to control its emissions. Eventually, the transfers will be treated as aid — an entirely unsatisfactory conclusion. Nor does the final text specify, as it should, that any such transfers should come over and above the current development aid budget. The US, in addition, wants institutions controlled by the West to be the nodal agencies for the flow of money; developing nations, correctly, want a new bank over which they will have some control.
While India is most at risk to climate change, the country’s contribution to all these issues has not been that of a leader. It still suffers from the way it helped sabotage agreement at Copenhagen in 2009. It is not certain that all the lessons from that fiasco have been learned. The next Conference of the Parties is in a year at Warsaw, by which time the modalities of the transfers will have to be worked out. India must realise that it needs to argue for mitigation and adaptation — and ensure that China, which pollutes much more than India, is subject to rules that India, much poorer and less polluting, can opt out of.