Symposium on 'Climate Change and India: Run-up to Bali'

The issue of climate change poses one of the greatest threats to human society at this point in time, one that is likely to affect all parts of the world. However, it is likely to be felt disproportionately, both across the world as well as within society. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that it is the most vulnerable sections of society that are likely to be the hardest hit. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that key issues such as mitigation and adaptation to climate change be discussed by key players.

Further, the issue of financing such endeavours must be discussed. In light of the government's commitment to maintaining a low fiscal deficit, alternative ways of financing, apart from public funds, have to be found. In addition to this, the role that civil society will play in terms of undertaking development-related initiatives, particularly on the issue of climate change and sustainability, also needs to be analysed.

In this context, Oxfam, in association with Centad, organised a symposium titled 'Climate Change and India : Run-up to Bali' at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, on November 16, 2007. Click here to see detailed Agenda.

The meet discussed various issues related to climate change in order to understand how it will affect India and what role civil society can play in the coming years.

Inaugural session

Jayashree Gopalan, Campaign Secretary, Oxfam International, welcomed the participants and invited Ashvin Dayal, Regional Director, South Asia Regional Centre, Oxfam GB, to chair the inaugural session and begin the conference.

Ashvin Dayal provided a brief but thoroughly comprehensive run-through of the main issues regarding climate change. He emphasised the fact that in today's world, the issue of climate change must necessarily concern all organisations across the board and is especially relevant to India as many countries will be looking to India to take the lead in terms of finding solutions to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.

India, he said, faces the twin challenges of fulfilling its commitment to sustainable development and safeguarding the livelihoods of the most vulnerable sections of its population, and doing so in a climate-friendly manner. He listed key areas of concern for the development sector with regard to climate change, such as the fact that poverty and pre-existing vulnerabilities are heightened by climate change, and the issue of equality.

He pointed out that unless countries that were most responsible for climate change took on the burden of cutting emissions, the global effort was likely to fall apart. He stressed on financing, and on the fact that governments would likely need to contribute a lot more money to dealing with climate change. Mechanisms of adaptation to climate change -- for example, carbon trading -- would also have to be put in place to deal with the coming changes. He concluded by saying that the time was ripe for a new model of development to emerge, one that would address poverty and inequality but would do so with the fundamental idea of clean growth powering it.

Dr Prodipto Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow, TERI, and Member of the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, presented his views on 'Options and Positions for Developing Countries'. In his informative presentation, he laid out what were likely to be key points of focus at the upcoming conference on climate change in Bali . He began by listing the positions held by the various players in the climate change debate, as follows:

• European Union (EU ): The EU is ready to cut emissions to 30% below 1990 by 2050 provided that all the measures taken to control emissions do not damage international competitiveness, and the same should be maintained at all costs. The EU also wants the United States to join the post-2012 arrangements. Non-Annex I countries need not make binding commitments in the medium term, while participation should be continued through the reformed Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and adaptation resources.
• United States : The United States maintains that there can be no cap on trade in the name of curbing emissions, but rather that there should be voluntary country-driven sectored approaches. A key concern is "barrier removal", ie, that there must be tariff reform to enable transfer of technology. The US also thinks that the goal of a 2-degree reduction in world temperature by 2050 is 'aspirational'.
• Developing countries : There exists a broad consensus among the G-77 countries on the key issues surrounding climate change. First, that developing countries would not accept any restraints on their growth or on poverty alleviation in the name of reducing emissions, and further, that since developing countries are not the ones who caused the problem in the first place, they should not be penalised for it, and would not undertake any legally binding commitments. Second, that the broad framework within which climate change is to be tackled ought to be Article 4.1 of the United Framework Convention on Climate Change, and that developing countries would not participate outside the Clean Development Mechanism. Third, that the goal of a 2-degree reduction could not be used to force developing countries to undertake legally binding commitments. And fourth, on the issue of adaptation, large resources are needed in order to put in place technology to deal with and mitigate the effects of climate change; but these funds could not come solely from developed countries.

Dr Ghosh then went on to talk about the recent and propitious meeting of minds between India and Germany, with the latter accepting the idea of convergence to per capita emissions, and that developing countries needn't make legally binding commitments. He remarked that while this was not the official position of the European Union, the fact that a powerful individual such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken this stand would carry a lot of weight. Dr Ghosh concluded by pointing out that uncertainties do remain in terms of how to tackle the issue of climate change, which would surely crop up at the Bali meet. These uncertainties are:

• At present, no models of regional climate change exist.
• Large scientific uncertainties remain.
• Global oil prices continue to be an extremely worrisome issue.

The floor was then opened for discussion.

Interactive session

The questions were varied, primarily focusing on what steps the Indian government would be taking to deal with climate change, to which Dr Ghosh responded that the Indian government was already taking many steps in terms of renewable energy, clean technology, public transportation, and creating carbon sinks.

On the issue of attribution of responsibility within the country in terms of individuals or sectors, Dr Ghosh said that there was no real segregation in terms of the kinds of emissions that are caused as a part of the production process and those that are caused purely through consumption. Until this demarcation is made there will be serious problems in attributing responsibility.

Responding to another question on the dangers of clubbing India and China together, since the two are different in many respects, Dr Ghosh said that in terms of poverty, both countries are similar in several key areas and that all developing countries would have to be bound by the same principles.

Tirthankar Mandal, Research Consultant, Centad, presented his views on 'Climate Change in India : Issues and Concerns'. He focused on the key issues surrounding climate change and how India fits into the scheme of things, both in terms of how it is likely to be impacted, and the steps it can take to tackle the issue. The effects of climate change on India would be devastating; a 2.3 to 4.8-degree rise in temperature would result in a phenomenal loss of livelihood and a dip of around 5% in GDP. Further, considering the ever-increasing rate of oil usage in the country, poor people would be paying as much as 87% more than what they were paying earlier for the fuel, while wealthier sections of society would be paying as much as 67% more.

On the commitments and initiatives that India has undertaken with a view to mitigating the damage done by climate change, he said that first, there was recognition of the notion of common but differentiated responsibility; second, that there would be a voluntary binding on future per capita emissions; third, that there would be a commitment towards aforestation and the creation of sinks.

Key concerns, he said, were primarily that technology to deal with climate change is created in foreign countries and this would make India overly dependent on outside countries. Second, it would be raw material-specific thus affecting Indian sovereignty both in terms of technology and raw materials. It is essential that the government plays a major role in tackling climate change. Component-wise carbon studies are needed in order to identify key pollutants and there is also an emergent need to explore alternative energy sources that may not yet be economical.

Shirish Sinha, Head, and Shruti Shukla, Coordinator, Climate Change and Energy Division, WWF-India, presented their views on 'The Development Dimension of Climate Change'.

Development and the eradication of poverty have always been linked to economic growth, the speakers pointed out. However, the method of achieving this growth has now resulted in harm to the environment and affected the climate. Key impacts and risks of climate change were listed, and agriculture was identified as being most affected. For India , with 60% of its population being supported by agriculture, the impact of climate change could imply production losses of about 50%. Further, climate change would contribute to the extinction of several species and result in coastal inundation, particularly in ecologically sensitive areas such as the Sunderbans delta. People would be forced to relocate to more viable locations and the impact on glaciers would also affect drinking water, etc. India's response to climate change should reflect a climate-smart approach to development. There is need to:

• Take into account the risks and costs involved in adaptation.
• Build capacity and institutional mechanisms so that climate management methods can be adequately handled.
• Ensure that proper disaster management schemes are put in place.
• Create a proper regulatory mechanism to handle water energy management, including the possibility of a price on water.

An integrated approach to the issue of climate change would be needed in order to deal with the issues of poverty and growth.

Interactive session

A very pertinent point was raised in terms of adaptation. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that climate change could be tackled effectively with India's existing infrastructural capabilities, so why is India dependent for technology on countries that are primarily responsible for affecting the climate in the first place?

Dr Gautam Vohra asked whether the issue of social engineering could be looked at as a means to address climate change. Responding to this, Shruti Shukla pointed out that for social engineering to actually take place, two things were required: first, support from the government, and second, a genuine shift in the mindset of people themselves. The government could introduce 'labelling' of products which allows consumers to pick the most environmentally friendly products. This was one means to bring about societal change.

Another relevant point that emerged from the discussion was that it would be wise for India to ensure that the people controlling trade are not those who dictate policy on climate change, for that could lead to a diluting of the real issue, which is primarily environmental.

Session 2: Global treaties on climate change and developing countries

R Ramachandran, Science Editor, Frontline, and Member of the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change chaired the second session and provided a thought-provoking discussion on the scenario immediately after the conclusion of the Rio Conference, and the position as it exists today.

After Rio , there was the impression that emission levels would reduce. However, that did not happen; in fact, emissions have only increased. The US, one of the largest emitters in the world, refused to join the Kyoto Protocol, and since this is an issue that affects the entire world, it would be necessary at this stage to create a framework within which the issue can be seriously dealt with. Such a framework would need to assess what exactly the possibilities for developing countries are, and what policy changes they would make to tackle climate change. Ramachandran also emphasised the pressing need to check the unbridled growth of the wealthy in India . He said that it would be necessary for the government to reduce its dependence on outside mechanisms and to come up with internal mechanisms to deal with the issue of climate change. India's focus would have to be domestic, but it would have to necessarily do so without constraining growth.

Professor Anwar Sadat, Assistant Professor, Indian Society of International Law, began his talk on the 'Post-Kyoto Scenario and Development Debate' by stating that the world today was witnessing the impasse created by the intersection between the climate crisis and development; the fact that on the one hand development growth cannot be sacrificed while on the other hand rich people are also fundamentally unwilling to alter their lifestyles. Therefore, we need to arrive at a threshold level at which development would not be compromised but where climate would still be controlled.

He stressed the following key factors during his talk:

• Mitigation: Development models would need to be structured so as to control the climate, and new areas of technology and resources would have to be looked into to arrive at these new models. Further, he spoke of the Global Environmental Facility and how it only provided funding for those systems which have a 'global' impact and thus only vulnerability surveys and the like were funded. Thus there was an urgent need to build more comprehensive and coherent criteria to determine funding.
• CDM and development: India ought not to be swayed by the Clean Development Mechanism, but rather should strictly monitor the effects of credits. It was essential that India fight for its development space.

Interactive session

A key bone of contention with the CDM was the fact that it failed to provide incentives for the people who were actually responsible for the creation of sinks and the growing of bio-fuel; for example, it was not the grower of bio-fuel who earned the credit but the polluting industry that uses the fuel. It thus gains the credits, and thereby the money, and ultimately the ability to continue to pollute. A question was raised as to whether there was a domestic carbon market in place. The answer was that there could be no such carbon market until proper limits on emissions in certain sectors were put in place and such a thing could only be achieved if it were made a domestic policy endeavour.

Nitya Nanda, Fellow, TERI, gave a stimulating presentation on 'Trade and Environment: Where does Climate Change stand?'.

Nanda commenced with a run-through of the genesis of environment in the trade scenario starting with the Marrakesh Agreement in 1994 which recognised sustainable development as one of its objectives. This was followed by conferences in Singapore , Seattle and Doha all of which touched upon climate change, the primary issue remaining the fact that climate change is a global problem which arises out of the manner in which human society has chosen to live. He then laid out briefly the key points of conflict between the WTO and the Kyoto Protocol, which have to do with the fact that if countries choose to treat the granting of emission rights as a form of subsidy, the WTO is likely to have a problem.

Moving to the issue of whether trade can actually reduce emissions, Nanda stressed that even if all barriers to clean technology were removed, there would still be a low impact on climate change. Further, the potential for such technology is quite low since these technologies are expensive and therefore tend to be inelastic. He pointed out that it would be worthwhile to examine the motives of the WTO at this juncture and to treat all pushes in the direction of free trade with caution.

A further issue was that trade itself is responsible for large amounts of emissions. For example, by 2020, emissions generated by the shipping industry would be more than all other sources of emissions put together. Therefore, he laid out the proposition that it might be feasible to restrict intra-industry trade to a certain extent, pointing out the fact that India was one of the largest exporters of rice and importers of wheat, and asked whether there really was a need to encourage trade for the sole purpose of expanding choice. He also brought up the idea of taxes on goods that were already available in the local market. He concluded his discussion by saying that post-Kyoto, the issue at Bali would need to be how to make such trade measures WTO-compatible.

The next speaker, Dr Lavanya Rajamani, Associate Professor, Centre for Policy Research, spoke on 'Developing Countries and Burden Sharing Arrangement in International Treaties'.

Dr Rajamani threw light on the background of the burden sharing arrangement by stating that historically there has been much bickering between developed and developing countries on the issue of burden sharing, with the latter saying it is unfair for them to be expected to pay the costs of dealing with climate change. Given the fact that India accounts for 5% of the world's emissions, and China accounts for about 16%, the two put together amount to one-fifth of total world emissions and therefore the problem cannot be solved without them. In this light, the position taken by these two countries has been conservative with the emphasis on the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention for Climate Change) being the only acceptable framework to tackle climate change, and the notion of common but differentiated responsibility. Running through the key provisions within the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC, Dr Rajamani said that the position taken by developing countries, while being within the UNFCCC, was not a good position to take for the following reasons:

• The majority of people affected by climate change will be Chinese and Indian.
• Climate change will have a large, detrimental affect on development goals.
• While there would indeed be a large cost involved in preventing or controlling climate change, there would be an equal if not greater cost involved in dealing with the fallout of climate change, for example, in terms of rehabilitation of victims of natural disasters.

Dr Rajamani concluded by highlighting the fact that commitments were urgently needed to solve the problem and the solution could not be that countries stick to predetermined positions; and governments could not stop dealing with the problem because they are scared of the economic hardships.

Interactive session

At the end of this discussion, the key point that emerged was that while there was a need to take concrete steps towards checking climate change, it was also true that developing countries presented a fairly strong argument in their favour. Gopa Kumar of Centad raised the point that it was primarily multi- and transnational corporations that sought to gain the most by enforcing legally binding commitments on trade and using the issue of climate change to force developing countries to open their doors to trade with them. Thus, the relevance of the caution displayed by developing countries could not be underestimated. 

Session 3: Climate change and development

The Chairman for the third session, N R Krishnan, Former Secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, handed over the floor to the first speaker immediately choosing to reserve his comments for the end of the session.

M G Chandrakanth, University of Agricultural Sciences , gave a comprehensive run-down of key agriculture-related concerns in his presentation titled 'Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change'.

The broad framework of the presentation was that climate change causes severe fluctuations -- and in most cases, a reduction -- in crop yields of specific important crops such as wheat and rice. For example, a 2-degree increase in temperature would cause a reduction in wheat productivity with a more pronounced reduction in rain-fed crops as opposed to irrigated crops. Another impact would be increased intensity of the hydrological cycle; there was plenty of evidence to show that the average annual rainfall has been much higher in certain areas and much lower in other key areas where it is traditionally high. An interesting aspect of the presentation was the light shed on Simarouba glauca, a particular variety of tree which could prove to be very useful both in mitigating the effects of climate change and also as a source of bio-fuel. Chandrakanth concluded that there must be a definite policy shift in terms of India's food security policy.

Srinivas Krishnaswamy, Political Adviser, Greenpeace, gave a brief but stimulating presentation on 'Emission Mitigation and Sustainable Development'.

He said that there was an undeniable link between sustainable development and emission mitigation; all development models which have sustainable development as their goal have an impact on controlling climate change. Therefore, by focusing more on the most viable forms of sustainable development, one might require less effort to deal with the fallout of climate change.

Since we follow certain policies which impact climate change, it is up to us to choose the pathway that would lead to de-carbonising while also contributing to growth, even if it costs a bit more in the immediate scheme of things. This pathway, he elucidated, involved a change in the energy mix of fuels that human beings currently employ, and which would tilt away from carbon sources to more environmentally friendly sources of fuel. A key advantage of this, he said, was that renewable sources of energy are practically self-financing, which is especially relevant because financing of climate control measures appears to be such a central issue. Ultimately, the key point remains that we must do what we can with what we have; in this regard, incremental improvements in existing technology could prove very useful in the long run.

The presentation by Vanita Suneja , India Coordinator, Economic Justice Campaign, Oxfam, threw light on Oxfam's stand on climate change, which is that poor people need to be at the centre of any planning. The rich countries need to honour their obligations to take the lead in the fight to control the global climate. It was also emphasised that the 2-degree limit should not be crossed under any circumstances.

Moving on to the issue of an adaptation fund, Suneja said that developed countries must deliver on finance for adaptation as part of a just and equitable agreement, post-2012. Additional finance for adaptation must not come out of existing aid commitments. So far, there has not been sufficient contribution to the adaptation fund. Developed countries spent phenomenal amounts of money attempting to cope with the impacts of climate change at home and hence there should not be an issue of lack of funds for adaptation.

The issue of adaptation could not purely be financial; changes are needed at the implementation level. Institutions need to be restructured, and decentralisation and involvement of panchayats was key in this regard. With regard to the use of bio-fuels, Oxfam's position is that such fuels can be used, but their impact must be studied very carefully, especially in light of evidence that shows that the targets and demand for bio-fuels in the North destroys livelihoods in the South.

The second segment of the presentation dealt with the Indian position on climate change and various key legislations that, apart from focusing on other issues, also help deal with climate change. However, India still lacks a comprehensive policy regime exclusively on climate change. The way forward, therefore, was the creation of a coherent policy on climate change with agriculture being a priority, and with the focus on small and marginal farmers. Also, funding for adaptation must increase if any success is to be achieved.

The floor was then opened up for the concluding round of questions which saw extremely active involvement from a large section of participants. R Ramachandran, in a comment directed at Chandrakanth, made the point that with regard to the droughts in Karnataka it would not be correct to impute these to climate change as rains have been very good in recent years in those regions; it is merely the rainfall cycle and not symptomatic of a larger environmental problem.

Tara Rao of WWF-India asked what India would be asking for when, on the one hand, it places the onus of taking the lead on developed countries but at the same time requires their money to begin domestic climate change initiatives. Suneja replied that there is provision for an adaptation fund in the protocol framework for developed nations to take fair responsibility for the impact of climate change in developing countries and least developed countries.

Another point of concern was that despite the rights of developing and least developed countries being recognised in the Kyoto Protocol, these rights are not in operation, so it remains to be seen whether India will achieve what it is looking for from the Bali meet. It was also the opinion of the participants that India should invest in renewable resources for sustainable development.

Delivering the closing comments, the Chairman, N R Krishnan, said that India is not shying away from its responsibility of mitigating the effects of climate change; in fact, in terms of energy efficiency it is among the best in the world. However, that said, the fact of climate change is not in dispute and is something that human societies have created; at this stage we are braced for a backlash. In order to do this, a certain amount of international assistance would be required. Krishnan closed the meet by remarking that all the issues discussed would need to be worked on consistently, and specific efforts to control energy pricing in areas of consumption would have to be made.

Linu Mathew Philip, a researcher from Centad, thanked the speakers and participants for their enlightening contributions, which would certainly go a long way towards demystifying key issues related to the problem of climate change.