Issues with climate negotiations

(MainsGS3: Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.)

Context:

• At COP27, the policy debate was no longer legitimized by science as there seems to be a concerted effort to fraudulently change the basic structure of the Climate Treaty.

Problems with the current negotiating process:

• Citizens in developed countries are not even aware that two-thirds of their national emissions of carbon dioxide come from their diet, transport, and residential and commercial sectors, which together constitute the major share of their GDP; the consumption sectors are not independent silos but reflect their urban lifestyles. 
• The process ignores that global well-being will also follow urbanisation of the developing country’s population, requiring fossil fuels for infrastructure and energy to achieve comparable levels. 
• The need for vast quantities of cement and steel in developing countries for infrastructure — constituting essential emissions, as they urbanise — is not being considered.

Not based on science:

• The objective of the Climate Treaty is to avoid a concentration of cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide, prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system and enable sustainable economic development. 
• The Paris Agreement (2015) agreed to a 1.5°C global temperature goal and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 recommended that net emissions needed to zero out around 2050. 
• In Glasgow, in 2021, negotiators zeroed in on coal to reduce future emissions which was not based on science and it ignored the key finding of the IPCC on the centrality of the carbon budget, i.e., cumulative emissions associated with a specific amount of global warming that scientifically links the temperature goal to national action.

Climate injustice:

• The process adopted the structure of international law in a manner that rejected historical responsibility for a continuing problem, and steadily shifted the burden to China and India.
• The agenda was set around globalised material flows described as global warming (the symptom), and not wasteful use of energy.
• Public finance is used as a means to secure a political objective, and not to solve the problem itself as the $100 billion promised at Paris along with pre-2020 commitments constituting the incentive for developing countries to agree to a global temperature goal has not materialised. 
• And, new funding for ‘Loss and Damage’ will be from a “mosaic of solutions”, constituting a breach of trust.

Conclusion:

• India’s thrust on LiFE (or “Lifestyle for Environment”), with the individual shifting from wasteful consumption of natural resources goes back to the original science. 
• Thus, consumption-based framing challenges the ‘universalism’ that has dominated the negotiations and its common path of reductions based on single models.