Re-conceptualizing Climate Equity – Positioning India as a global leader

This article provides a brief on the key outcomes of the 2011 Durban COP specifically with regards to impact, influence and process to leverage India’s position on climate equity.

Key agreement at the Durban COP

The key outcome of the Durban talks is an agreement on achieving a new mitigation regime by 2015 and implementation by 2020. This new regime, unlike the Kyoto Protocol, will see developing countries joining the developed countries in some form of emission reduction target. Although the actual text of the agreement mentions it as “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force”, whether or not it will allows any penalties for the binding target remains to be seen. The other important facet is the absence of any explicit reference to climate equity and differentiation of reduction targets among nations.

Durban talks also reach a consensus on Global Green Climate Fund to channel finance for mitigation and adaptation actions in the poorer nations. The fund will funnel US$100b per annum by 2020. Discussion around sourcing and designing the fund are currently underway.

Key action items resulting from the agreement is the formation of an Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. This working group will formulate the action plans on mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology development and transfer, transparency of action, and support and capacity-building for a review phase of 2013-15 before new regime is enforced. Parties and observer organizations are submitting their views on these plans by the end of February 2012.

India’s equity stance received a setback

Unlike the earlier climate negotiations, India’s emphasis on equity based emission targets did not find a strong echo amongst the smaller developing countries and island nations, for whom climate risks are seen more imminent. These nations chose to align to the EU proposal. Durban agreement is the first of its kind where India signed a deal without pro forma reference to equity or differentiation on emission targets (Jayaram T (2011)). The legally binding nature of emission reduction commitment is open to interpretation on the actual text and this perhaps encouraged India to sign in the first place.

Regardless, the key lesson that has emerged is that climate equity and historical emissions by the developed economies cannot be the ‘once for all’ arguments.

Instead, what developing economies like India need, is a concrete path towards demonstration of low carbon economic growth to supplement their stance on equity.

This is important to allay concerns such as the ones raised by Prof. Dubash at JNU, specifically:
1.Permission to pollute on a per capita basis has an ethical barrier. It allows freeway to countries to choose their own development strategy (for a committed emission level) with little acknowledgement of the fact that such choice has greater bearing on earth’s future and collectively so. No doubt costs to pollute need a differentiated measure among countries, but the choice of development path is paramount.
2.Measure of emission is not helpful if done without correlation to development and technological advancement. And in both these areas, the context to historical emission figures is not the same as the current times.

Re-conceptualizing climate equity - an afterthought

Re­conceptualizing equity and differentiation are necessary first steps for shaping India’s climate strategy going forward. Emission intensity levels of GDP in PPP terms, rather than per capita basis, is perhaps an alternative to explore. Figure 1 illustrates comparisons of the emission intensities as well as per capita emission of major economies and India for the year 2009 as reported byIEA. It is interesting to note that on both accounts of emission intensity and emission per capita, India compares ‘favorably’ against OECD group, North America and China.

This comparison becomes even more compelling when considering the historic figures of emission intensities among these economic regions since they have been the biggest polluters (see Figure 2). Both India and the Europe (who arguably emerged as the global leader at the Durban talks), clearly have the right to present themselves as global leaders in context of their efforts and success in maintaining a much lower emissions per unit of GDP (in PPP terms) for the most recent decade.

While more analysis and debate maybe required to build consensus on the rationale behind GDP based emission intensities, the framework represents an opportunity to provide ‘meat’ to India’s position and continued role as a world leader on climate issues as:
1.Such comparisons buttress the equity argument in favor of systems and development interventions that are decoupled from emission.
2.It provides a forward looking competitive perspective to climate equity in terms of emission intensity of development (read GDP), if targets are set with careful differentiation between developed and developing economies.
3.It creates a level playing field for developed and developing economies with respect to technology adoption towards their respective low carbon development paths.

Onus is on our policy leaders to build the argument around this framework and position India’s continued commitment and success in defining practices that are intrinsically less emitting in nature.

References
1.COP, UNFCCC (2011) “Advance unedited version Draft decision -/CP.17   Establishment of an Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action”. Available online - http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/durban_nov_2011/decisions/application/pdf/cop17_durbanplatform.pdf,accessed on 27 January 2012
2.IEA (2011) “CO₂Emissions from Fuel Combustion - 2011 Highlights”. Available online - http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/, accessed on 27 January 2012
3.Jayarama T (2011) “Post-Durban, India has its task cut out”. Available online - http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2729539.ece, accessed on 27January 2012
4.Dubash N (2011) “Looking beyond Durban: Where to from here?” Economic & Political Weekly vol xlvii no 3. EPW Research Foundation. Available online- http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/17019.pdf, accessed on 27 January 2012

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