India claims victory at Lima climate meet

LIMA | NEW DELHI: India has claimed victory at the Lima climate talks, with the final agreement restoring a difference in the manner in which rich and poor countries made efforts to tackle climate change through an explicit reference to “the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”.
“We are happy that the final negotiated statement at COP 20 (twentieth session of the Conference of Parties) in Lima has addressed the concerns of developing countries and mainly the efforts of some countries to re-write the Convention has not fructified,” environment minister Prakash Javadekar said.

“It gives enough space for the developing world to grow and take appropriate nationally determined steps,” he said, referring to explicit inclusion of the principle of common but differentiation in the text of the Lima Call for Climate Action.

An explicit reference to the principle, commonly referred to as CBDR in United Nations climate negotiations parlance, has been absent since the Durban round of talks in 2011, when countries decided to begin work on a new climate compact, which would be applicable to all countries.

Industrialised countries too claimed victory at Lima, stressing that the negotiations put to rest the watertight classification of the world into developed and developing, which had been set out by the 1992 Climate Change Convention inked at Rio.

The final decision document, Lima Call for Climate Action, states that the 2015 agreement to be finalised in Paris in December next year will reflect “the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances”. This iteration of the 1992 principle is the formulation used by the US and China in their November climate agreement.

Though the United States has maintained that it respected the principle, it stressed that the world had changed since 1992 and it could not accept a formulation that did not require the biggest emitters, even though these were developing countries, to take action to address climate change.

China has been consistent in its demand that the differentiation between rich and poor countries had to be preserved as it encapsulated a sense of fairness in assigning responsibility for global warming and climate change.

However, climate change negotiations experts and analysts were cautious of the import of the new formulation, especially as both sides claimed victory.

The industrialised countries claimed it was the end of the North-South divide and each country would be judged for itself. While the poor developing countries viewed it as the recognition of the historical responsibility of industrialised countries to take action to address climate change.

The UN’s climate chief Christiana Figueres described the new iteration of the 1992 principle as extremely significant. There are three pieces of the concept, she said: one is the historical responsibility, which is undeniable, of industrialised countries, followed by the respective capacities and capabilities of countries, and finally, national circumstances.

“From a political and operational point of view it is a very important breakthrough that actually opens the way towards a Paris agreement,” the UNFCCC executive secretary said.

The formulation on differentiation, a direct lift from the US-China November deal, helped paper over differences at Lima and ensured a successful conclusion for the talks.

It still leaves unresolved the manner in which it will be put to practice—the difference in the pledges that developing and developed countries submit ahead of the Paris meet.

This crucial political question which has been left unresolved particularly since the Durban round of talks will now need to be settled in a manner that is acceptable to all countries. Over the next year, ahead of the December 2015 talks, there will need to be serious engagement on operationalising this principle.

Proposals by BASIC partners Brazil and South Africa, which attempt to find way to balance development needs of developing countries, the historical responsibility of industrialised countries and the need to take into account the changed global economic realities, could provide a workable option. Both efforts amplify the principles enshrined in the Convention.

The Brazilian proposal at Lima recognises that the industrialised countries (listed in Annexe I of the Convention) must shoulder the main responsibility for addressing climate change. At the same time, it also recognises that over a period of time developing countries too must graduate and take on more responsibilities.

The South Africa-backed Africa Group’s proposal of an Equity Reference Framework provides a measurement or assessment for the efforts each country needs to do as its share to address climate change. It takes into account historical responsibilities, current capabilities and development needs to measure a country’s level of responsibility.

India has so far been non-committal on both these proposals.

Injecting a sense of caution, experts say that New Delhi will now have to either engage with these options or come up with one of its own if India is to preserve its development space.

“While CBDR has been underscored, there is a need for India to be careful, and communicate the development deficit and challenges. India is number three in terms of aggregate emissions but that fact completely ignores the development deficit and that India has the lowest per capita emissions among the emerging economies,” said Harjeet Singh, Action Aid International’s lead expert on resilience and climate change.