Lima wasn’t all hot air

The Lima Call for Climate Action is a success of sorts as much for developed countries as for developing nations. By capturing in a little over 40 pages the options put forward by countries during the conference based on the Chair’s draft negotiating text of over 600 pages, the agreement is also a masterly exercise in précis writing.

It would be interesting to see why the Lima conference which has left many crucial things hanging in balance should be hailed.

First, the longstanding tussle between the developed and developing countries over their relative roles and responsibilities in taking up measures necessary to limit global warming to 2 or 1.5 degrees Celsius above the temperatures prevailing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1775) has been resolved by calling upon all countries to come up with Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to reduce their global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, instead of targets being set for them under a multilateral agreement. The only caveat is that the INDCs should be “fair and ambitious” in the light of the countries’ “national circumstances.”

This made the warring groups happy with rich ones, on the one hand, getting out of the Kyoto Protocol after 2020 and gloating over their success in roping in China and India into a control regime, though weak, and the rest of the poor, on the other hand, being allowed to carry on their businesses as usual, more or less, well into the future.

As for China and India, as far back as 2009 in Copenhagen, and later, they had expressed their readiness to bring down the GDP intensity of their greenhouse gas emissions significantly and hence had to concede no fresh ground at Lima. They too could afford to join in the applause.

Second, the demand of developing nations to accord as much primacy to adaptation to the adverse impacts of global warming and climate change as to mitigation of GHG emissions has been fully recognised. Suggested formulations in the draft negotiating text that “adaptation is a global challenge that must be addressed with the same urgency as mitigation” and that international financing would be divided almost equally between mitigation and adaptation efforts have found favour with the poor. How far these sentiments would be translated into practice remains a moot point but for the present the words are reassuring.

Third, the vexed issues of finance, technology development and transfer and IPRs has been addressed by referring to what is expected of both the providers (developed countries) and the needy (developing countries).

So, from what was predicted to end in disaster, Lima came out as one of the more fruitful gatherings.

The devil, they say, is always in the detail and in UN circles with the convoluted verbiage of UN literature. So it is with the Lima Negotiating Text for consideration at the official level talks preceding the Conference of Parties in Paris late next year.

The collective physical goal of reducing emissions has been left for discussion in the months following the States’ communicating their INDCs. How quickly such a knotty issue can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction before the Paris meet is anyone’s guess.

There are other issues that would see confrontation between the rich and the emerging major economies such as China and India. So far these two have taken shelter behind the provision of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR), exempting developing countries from accepting definitive emission cuts. This principle still holds good but is sought to be given a twist to segregate China and India from others by adding a term “evolving’ before “ common …”.

That is, these two, having come of age, can no longer be clubbed with their poorer cousins and should stand deprived of their exemption. This issue of limiting the emissions of China and India will surely occupy centre-stage in 2015.

China’s recent announcement to reduce the GDP intensity of its emissions by 40-45 per cent over the level of 2005 by the year 2025 and peak its emissions by 2030 has endeared it to the world community.

India has expressed a realistic goal of attaining a target of 20-25 per cent reduction by 2020. Announcing when India would peak its emissions is clearly out of the question. It is a welcome sign that the Lima Call does not invite such an announcement.

Lima, at best, is an uneasy compromise.

The writer is a former secretary to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change