The Paris climate negotiations are just a few days away. The base for this exercise is the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), tabled by governments of various countries. These offers are not up for negotiation. The open questions for negotiation are matters like the legal form of the agreement, the review process, the quantum and modalities for the delivery of finance and technology assistance, and a variety of other procedural matters. However, the decisions on these matters must be guided by the adequacy of the pledges made in the INDCs.
The Emissions Gap Report (EGR) prepared by a team of scientists under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), presents two conclusions: One, the INDCs do present a significant reduction compared to a projection of current policies; and two, the proposed mitigation contributions are far from enough to keep us on the 2°Celsius pathway. The estimated gap between the unconditional promises and the 2°C path is 14 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2030 and seven GtCO2e in 2025. If the promises, conditional on international support, are included, this gap comes down by two GtCO2e. According to the EGR, the promises can limit the global average temperature increase to three to 3.5°C by the end of the century with a greater than 66 per cent chance.
The INDCs are meant to be fair and adequate. There is no agreed metric for this, and the evaluation of this dimension has been left to non-governmental organisations (NGOs). According to one such report, "Fair Shares: A Civil Society Equity Review of INDCs", the pledges from poorer countries amount to 10.1 GtCO2e, well in excess of their estimated fair share of 6.6 GtCO2e, while the rich country pledges amount to only 5.5 GtCO2e against their fair share of 24.2 GtCO2e. The ambition of all major developed countries fall well short of their fair shares, which include not only domestic action but also international finance.
Those with the starkest gap between their climate ambition and their fair shares are Russia, whose INDC represents zero contribution towards its fair share; Japan, whose INDC represents about one-tenth of its fair share; United States, whose INDC represents about a fifth of its fair share; and the European Union, whose INDC represents just over a fifth of its fair share.
Another non-official initiative, the Climate Action Tracker, has evaluated INDCs of individual countries against a wide range of criteria of fairness and what they need to be for the world to stay on the 2°C path. They categorise the country's effort as inadequate if all governments putting forward comparable offers would lead to warming likely to exceed 3-4°C. Their list of countries with such an inadequate effort include Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
The US barely manages to stay out of the "inadequate" category; its effort is rated as medium, which is at the less ambitious end of the 2°C range and would require many other countries to make a comparably greater effort and much deeper reductions. Only a handful of small countries (Bhutan is one) have made offers fully or more than fully consistent with the 2°C path.
The developed countries often argue that climate change is the greatest security threat the world faces. But their promises do not reflect any such urgency. Their climate diplomacy seems to be driven largely by a desire to protect their lifestyle and shift the burden of adjustment to the developing world, particularly to China and India. This has to be resisted. The developed countries must raise their mitigation contributions to a level much closer to their fair share of the required effort, a course that will require substantial changes in lifestyle or make firm commitments to support mitigation efforts by developing countries through finance and technology.
The promises in the INDC are an improvement on present trends and on previous offers at Copenhagen and Cancun. The bulk of this improvement is due to the voluntary effort of developing countries like India and China. But they fall short not just of the 2°C goal but also of what is possible without much pain. Several recent studies show that tapping into this unused emission reduction potential could narrow the emissions gap in 2030 by between five to 12 GtCO2e per year in 2030, thus significantly reducing the gap relative to the desired 2°C path.
The EGR also draws attention to International Cooperative Initiatives (ICI) outside the framework convention, like the ones that bring together city administrations or those that involve voluntary efforts by major corporations, and estimates the additional contribution of these to be as much as two GtCO2e. Most of these ICIs involve entities in the developed and developing world, but the leadership comes generally from the former.
The EGR also draws attention to the potential of forestry initiatives, which find a prominent place in several developing country INDCs, including the submissions by India and China. In some ways all this marks an effort to shift the burden of mitigation to developing countries.
The principal implication of this assessment of the INDCs is that we need a process that applies pressure to improve on the current 2030 offers, particularly on countries whose offers have been judged to be inadequate. Most of these are part of the developed world, those that should lead the mitigation effort if the spirit of the climate convention is respected.
Climate diplomacy is a battle for the minds of opinion makers. Moving developed countries from the prosecutor's chair to the defendant's dock will be possible if we have quinquennial reviews timed to link with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments and a more formal process on equity and burden sharing. It will also require a more substantial presence of think tanks and NGOs in developing countries in global assessments of fairness, adequacy and ambition. India is well placed to lead this effort if the government and private corporations open their purses so that think-tanks with competence in this area do not have to depend on foreign funding.
nitin-desai@hotmail.com
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