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hey came, they talked, and they almost failed. That seems
to be the trajectory of most of the conferences on climate
change held under the auspices of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The latest,
the 20th Conference of Parties (CoP 20) at Lima, Peru, was not very
different. Over a thousand delegates from 190 countries talked,
argued, bargained, negotiated and finally, after extending the
meeting by a couple of days, came up with a patchwork Lima
Call for Climate Action with which no one was completely satisfied. This document is expected to form the basis for negotiations leading up to the crucial Climate Summit in Paris in 2015
when nations are expected to arrive at a legally binding international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that lapsed in 2012.
Why, one wonders, is the same routine repeated when in 2014
the fact that human intervention is responsible for global warming
and climate change has been convincingly established? Fortunately,
in Lima no one wasted time arguing about the science of climate
change. Yet they continued to debate about who should shoulder
the principal responsibility for curbing greenhouse gases (GHGs)
and how adaptation measures could be financed. When the Kyoto
Protocol was negotiated and agreed upon in 1997, few disputed that
the older industrialised nations had to bear the primary responsibility. The world was cleaved into two halves developed and developing. The former had to curb emissions while the latter were to be
helped to adopt cleaner technologies and adapt to climate change.
Almost two decades later, the picture has changed. China,
defined as developing in 1997, is now the worlds largest emitter
of GHG. It has exceeded the US and the European Union. Although
India stands at number four in the list of the six largest emitters of
GHGs, its total emissions are less than a quarter of Chinas. But
more significant than global rankings is the fact that the carbon
budget, a concept that the fourth assessment on climate change
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put
forward last year, is precipitously close to being consumed.
The IPCC calculated that the earths atmosphere could absorb
at the most 800-880 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) before
global warming exceeded the 2C mark. The problem is that the
earth has already accumulated 530 gigatonnes of CO2, leaving
only a third of this carbon budget. If the rate of emissions does
not reduce drastically, we are staring at the inevitability of a
climate change precipice where the only direction in which the
earth will go is down. Against this frightening future, squabbling
Economic & Political Weekly
EPW
vol xlix no 51