The developed countries should not count private investments against the commitment of $100 billion annual fund for fighting climate change, India demanded, along with several other developing countries, at the recently meeting of select countries in Warsaw.
Poland was the host of this year’s annual climate talks.
The meeting, called the pre-COP (Conference of Parties), is organised to firm up the agenda for the meeting, where all member-countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change gather. It helps the host country and other key countries informally etch out areas of differences and agreements that could lead to some concrete decisions at the main meeting.
At the Warsaw meet, held on October 2-4, the developing nations also demanded that the developed countries deliver clarity on how they would put up the promised $ 100 billion fund. The developed countries had promised to drum up an annual stream of 100 billion starting 2020. But poorer countries have been demanding a clear road map of how the developed countries will ratchet up their funding support.
The issue of “loss and damage” also found common support from the developing countries at the meet. The poorer countries have demanded for sometime that there must be a mechanism to compensate the countries that will suffer from global warming that are bound to occur from emissions that had triggered changes in the climate.
The subject has so far found very little support from the developed world as it requires them to somehow acknowledge a historical responsibility for past emissions – an anathema to most, especially the U.S.
The meeting also saw countries conclude that the COP, starting November 11, must draw up a clear time line against which the new global agreement will be drafted and finalised.
A large area of disagreement persisted over how the targets of emission reductions will be reviewed for being adequate to match up to the globally set requirement. Negotiations through the year sent a general signal that the new agreement will require countries to volunteer targets for emission reduction that will then be assessed for their ‘adequacy’ in matching up to cumulative emission reduction required to keep global temperatures from spiking more than 2 degrees beyond the pre-industrial era.
At the pre-COP, several countries expressed apprehensions about the difficulty of enhancing the volunteered emission reduction targets that were once approved by respective governments.
Disagreements were also expressed by the developing countries, including India, against the idea of a ‘thin agreement’ in 2015, which has the backing of the U.S. Also called the hub and spoke model in climate jargon, it suggests that only the targets of reducing emissions should form part of the main agreement in 2015. The rest of the issues, such as finance, adaptation and technology transfer, it has been suggested, can be dealt with later under legally less onerous decisions of the COP.
The Polish presidency of the conference also informed that it planned to bring the issue of numbers for financing for the developing world climate actions and loss and damage at the high-level segment.
This is the last leg of the two-week meeting attended by ministers from the respective countries.
The Polish presidency came under some criticism from the developing countries for bringing in industry representatives also to make presentations at the pre-COP meeting, an occasion that has been usually kept for government to government informal negotiations. The developing countries pointed out that only large corporate houses from the developed world found representation in the meeting.
