#EarthDayWithDNA: Fighting climate change in an unequal world

With the ascent of US President Donald Trump, the climate agreement signed by most countries in Paris in December 2015 is in grave danger of being diluted, with the distinct possibility of the US — the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — pulling out. The agreement was modest in its ambition, since it required each country to state its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to reducing carbon emissions, and then subject such voluntary commitments to international scrutiny.

The prevarication by the US, which was the top polluter till China replaced it a few years ago, will obscure the basic dichotomy in climate negotiations between industrial and developing countries. The former was responsible for the problem by burning fossil fuels at an alarming rate, while the later is paying the price for it. What is more, as the late Anil Agarwal of the Delhi-based think-tank, Centre for Science & Environment, argued in the early 1990s, there is a distinction between the “historical” emissions of industrial countries and “survival” emissions of developing countries.

US official sources, using UN data, show that the average American emitted 16.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2013, as opposed to 7.6 tonnes by a Chinese and only 1.6 tonnes by an Indian. Gulf states fared worst, with Qatar registering 40.5 tonnes, and Kuwait 27.3 tonnes. If one takes the global ecological footprint, which is the amount of land and water that each person occupies to source one’s natural resources, the UAE also fares badly, since it obtains these from other countries.

During UN climate negotiations, beginning with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” for tackling climate change between developed and poor countries was firmly established, but is being gradually watered down by the former. Basically, they want all countries to take action to mitigate the consequences of climate change, rather than adapt to it as the global South has to do.

The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai holds an annual climate conference, where it has been putting forward the concept of a ‘carbon budget’. This is the amount of emissions that industrial versus developing countries have to avert catastrophic climate change from crossing two degrees Celsius. Between 2012 and 2100, this will amount to a total of 270 Gigatonnes of carbon (Gtc). Forgetting about historical emissions and simply dividing this budget between all countries on a per capita basis, industrial countries have only 50 Gtc left. If one takes the pledge made by June 2015, including the pre-2020 commitments and the INDCs (mostly till 2030), when TISS held its meet before the Paris conclave, developed countries will be emitting 51Gtc between 2012 and 2030 itself. As TISS argues, “So the budget that is available to industrial countries for the duration of 88 years will be exhausted in a span of 18 years.

“These countries will therefore consume more than their per capita share of the future carbon budget (as they have already done for the cumulative carbon dioxide emitted in the past). This would mean that either the developing countries will have to undertake mitigation burdens that are inequitably large, or the world will have to face a maximum temperature increase of more than two degrees Celsius — the burden of which will also fall on developing countries.”

The notion of equity therefore is the bedrock of climate negotiations, which is now being abandoned in favour of a one-size-fits-all approach. What is more, the equity should be operationalised, and not just mouthed as rhetoric, in the formulation and implementation of post-Paris goals.

In 1991, Agarwal and Sunita Narain titled their startling treatise ‘Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism’. This rebutted calculations by the Washington-based World Resources Institute that China and India figured among the top five emitters in the world. It pointed to the flaws in these estimates as well as the omission of historical emissions in the US institute’s calculus. Instead, it for the first time posed the more telling alternative — per capita emissions, which tell an entirely different story. Thus, while China figures at the top of the world’s emitters today, its per capita emissions is less than half of an American’s.

While pointing to the global inequality in climate negotiations, one should not fall into the trap of ignoring the inequalities within emerging countries like India. The emissions of some 300 million Indians will approximate developed countries’ levels and have to be reduced in order to establish a level playing field within the country. Otherwise, the poor will bear the burden of climate change — whether it is the searing heat of Phalodi in Rajasthan, which touched 51 degrees Celsius in 2016, or Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, or floods in eastern India.

A 2015 study titled ‘Climate Change: A Risk Assessment’ by research agencies in the US, China, the UK and India in 2016, claimed that flooding in the Ganga basin could become six times more frequent by the end of this century.  According to another 2015 study by the US-based National Centre for Atmospheric Research, soot or ‘black carbon’ in peninsular India travels southwards from the northern plains, where poor households cook on smoky wood stoves. This carbon constitutes nearly one-tenth of the finest measurable particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less, which lodges itself in one’s lungs and causes severe impairment. Besides, when these pollutants are wafted on to the Himalayan slopes, they accentuate snow melt with floods alternating with drought in the Indo-Gangetic belt.

There is thus a strong case for helping poor households in northern India switch to cleaner fuels like LPG, as well as solar energy. Indeed, this presents India with the opportunity to develop its renewable energy industry, a market which is expected to touch  US$6 trillion by 2030. China is emerging as the leader, but India could well have a toe in the door with its International Solar Alliance, which was unveiled in Paris two years ago.

The author is Chairperson, Forum of Environmental Journalists of India (FEJI)