NEW DELHI (CU)_US Special Envoy for Climate Change, John Kerry, is currently on a three-day visit in India, as Washington attempts to rekindle its climate change partnerships with foreign nations, after holding back for four years under the Trump administration.
Over the recent months, it has become evident that the Western nation has set out on a mission to reclaim its global climate leadership, after having itself removed from global forums on the climate crisis in the previous years.
Accordingly, the US President Joe Biden will convene a virtual Climate Leaders’ Summit, later this month, which will be the Biden administration’s largest international intervention on climate change so far. Moreover, it is widely expected that the United States may commit itself to a net-zero emission target for 2050, during this Conference.
The immediate purpose of Kerry’s visit to India is to exchange notes ahead of the summit, which will be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, the US Climate Envoy may also plan on exploring if New Delhi is open to negotiating its stance on net-zero emissions, as the South Asian nation has been one of the major players who has been holding out on such commitments.
Several countries across the globe, such as Germany, Japan, Canada and South Korea, have expressed their intention to commit to carbon neutrality in the near future, while many other countries, including the United Kingdom and France, have already enacted legislations promising to achieve this goal by 2050.
On the other hand, the European Union is currently working on setting out a region-wide law which would commit the member states to achieving carbon neutrality by the middle of the century.
However, as the world’s third largest emitter, India, has been a key player that has failed to make any noteworthy commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
With growing concerns over consequences of climate inaction over recent past, more countries have pledged to moderately bring down their carbon emissions over the next few decades, thereby achieving carbon neutrality by mid-century.
However, unlike what the term suggests, net-zero does not mean to slash emissions to zero. Instead, it refers to the process of compensating a country’s emissions by absorbing and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This can be achieved through the use of futuristic technology including carbon capture and storage, or through the creation of carbon sinks such as forests.
The significance of this is that a country would be able to become carbon-neutral at its current level of emissions or even by increasing this level, so long as they are absorbed and removed.
Experts say that the only way to achieve the Paris Agreement target of maintaining global temperatures below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels, is by achieving global carbon neutrality by 2050.
However, India is among the countries which will be most impacted by such a commitment. As the South Asian nation continues to push for higher economic growth in order to pull out hundreds of millions of citizens from poverty, the country is expected to grow at the fastest pace in the world over the next few decades. This means that no amount of reforestation could capture the increasing emissions, while most capturing and storage technologies are very expensive and sometimes unreliable.
Moreover, New Delhi argues that the 2015 Paris Agreement merely calls on signatories to take the best climate action it can in order to achieve the long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C. Accordingly, countries are required to set climate targets for the next 5 – 10 years and demonstrate how they have been achieved. On the hand, the targets for the subsequent period should be more ambitious than the previous one.
Therefore, the India argues that instead of launching parallel initiatives on carbon-neutrality outside the framework of the Paris Accord, countries should be focusing on delivering the promises they’ve already made.
New Delhi points to the fact that some of the major economies in the world have already failed to deliver on their past promises and commitments, particularly those taken up under the Kyoto Protocol, the climate accord preceding the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile, India is hoping to lead by example, with the country being the only member of G-20 whose climate initiatives are compliant to the goal of maintain global temperatures from rising beyond 2°C. Even the initiatives of some of the major players in climate action, such as the European Union, are assessed to be “insufficient” to reach this goal.
As some countries openly walked out of the Kyoto Protocol without any consequences, India warns that promises to achieve carbon-neutrality by mid-century may be met with a similar fate.
Therefore, New Delhi calls on developed nations across the globe to firstly make bolder commitments to deliver on previous unfulfilled promises. At the same time, the country claims that it has not completely ruled out plans to achieve net-zero by 2050 or 2060. But it does believe that it is still too early to make such an international commitment.
