Climate deception in the name of action
Developed countries are now shifting their responsibility for climate finance to larger developing countries, private sector, and market forces
The Africa Climate Summit held in early September revealed all that is wrong with how the climate crisis is being tackled. The African continent has contributed the least to historical emissions — only around 3% or so, and hence has nothing to do with the climate crisis. In fact, Africa is a major victim of its fallout. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 600 million have no access to electricity. Consequently, the focus should have been on their “adaptation” to climate change, on loss and damage and on ensuring “new and additional financing”, as per the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. But the focus of the African Climate Summit was on “mitigation” since it suited the developed countries.
What was even worse was that instead of acknowledging the historical responsibilities of the developed countries and focusing on meeting their own immediate 2030 Paris mitigation targets (which they are nowhere near to meeting), the developed countries focused more on setting up an African carbon market where they will sustain or even increase their own emissions by buying carbon credits from African countries, who will be obliged to cut down their emissions! For example, the UAE Carbon Alliance announced an agreement to buy $450m of carbon credits by 2030 from the African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI). The message is simple: You small emitters cut emissions, so that we big polluters can keep polluting. Civil society has condemned carbon credits as “neo-colonisation”.
We also have the European Union (EU) unilaterally imposing carbon border taxes such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) under the ironically titled “green deal”, hitting directly at developing countries by putting in place another non-tariff barrier to equalise domestic and imported prices. And this is in complete disregard of UNFCCC principles like equity and common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) and differentiation.
On the other hand, the developed countries have actually increased their consumption of fossil fuels and also legitimised the use of “natural gas” as an important transitional energy source, with the EU including it in their “taxonomy” for “green investments”. A recent report by Oil Change International says that five developed countries namely the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom (UK) will account for 51% of the planned expansion of new oil and gas fields till 2050. The UK has just now backtracked on its climate goals saying that it imposes “unacceptable costs” on its people. On the other hand, imposing “unacceptable costs” on the development of the Global South is kosher. For example, at the Summit, the African countries were forced into a renewable energy pathway. While a five-fold increase in renewable energy by 2030 (from 56 GW to 300 GW) sounds good on paper, it is ominous when you see the overall reality.
An analysis (Tejal Kanitkar and T Jayaraman) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th synthesis report’s mitigation pathways reveals that such inequitable pathways will ensure that sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita will grow from $1,000 to $3,000 by 2050 while for developed countries it will grow from $35,000 to $69,000 for the corresponding period! If there is one big deception and climate injustice, this is it!
Unfortunately, references to these unsustainable IPCC mitigation pathways are in the New Delhi G20 Summit Declaration as well, which will seriously impact South Asia also. While developed countries pledged $23 billion for Africa, given their track record of missing every pledge on financing (including non-fulfilment of the pledge to provide $100 billion per annum from 2020 onwards), one doubts whether there will be any new and additional finances or merely innovative accounting. Even then, the goal of 50-50 for mitigation-adaptation, crucial for Africa, is nowhere close. As the host President William Ruto of Kenya said, “Those who produce the garbage refuse to pay their bills.”
On the crucial question of debt burden on Africa, there was very little progress in the Africa Summit. The broader reality is that the donors are refusing to meet their financial commitments. Covid and conflicts ensured that funds for development, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate action went to humanitarian issues. The developed countries are now shifting their responsibility for climate finance to larger developing countries, the private sector, market forces and multilateral development banks. Fortunately, in the recent G20 Declaration, there was at least an acknowledgement that $5.8-5.9 trillion in the pre-2030 period was required for developing countries, as well as $4 trillion per year for clean energy technologies by 2030. But the mobilisation of such finance is up in the air.
The irony is that, as the Indian delegation pointed out, “unsustainable production and consumption of the developed world that brings the entire planet to the threshold of the current climate and ecological crises, is hardly called into question…” India has walked the talk and proposed LiFE or Lifestyle for the Environment, which has now been endorsed by the G20 Summit.
In the midst of broken promises comes the G20 Declaration’s “recognition” of “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global GHG emissions of 43% by 2030 relative to 2019 levels”. When the developed countries haven’t met their 2020 targets or are not on the course or even backtracking on the Paris targets, let alone early net zero, this seems another pie-in-the-sky target. Will there be any carbon budget left for the development of developing countries? Will disruptive technological breakthroughs be forthcoming or will it be like waiting for Godot?
With the G20 Declaration repeating the Glasgow Conference of Parties’ (COP) agreement on fossil fuels, and with fossil-rich UAE hosting COP 28, where there is no chance of this being tinkered with, the setting up of the Global Biofuels Alliance by India is an important development. And so, with COP28 just around the corner, there is so much to do but no political will among developed countries.
TS Tirumurti was ambassador, permanent representative of India to the UN (2021-22) and former climate change negotiator. The views expressed are personal