What’s affecting climate talks?
What’s affecting climate talks? US presidential elections and conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are factors affecting climate talks
COP29 is not really taking place at an opportune moment. The real intention of the debate as to who all should contribute to the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) fund is to delay matters further when it comes to resource transfer.
We are back to where we had left off during COP28. In the recently concluded Bonn talks, a precursor to COP29 (to be held in Baku in November), there was no consensus regarding resource transfer for climate change. This, however, is not surprising given the fact that the world community has been labouring over the transfer of $100 billion per year since the last 15 years, without success. This kitty, however, has been given a new name — New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) — though without any flesh and blood in the form of money. The developed world is engaged in who all should contribute to this fund and the latest missive is that countries like China and Saudi Arabia should also be viewed as donors rather than recipients.
When we talk about the quantum of money actually required, it is in trillions of dollars and not billions. The figure of $100 billion was arrived at more than 15 years ago without due diligence. The actual requirement can be anything between $1 trillion to $6 trillion annually. The reason why China is being singled out is because it is the largest polluter and because its gross domestic product and per capita income has grown manifold in the last two decades. For the record, it may be mentioned that when the Kyoto Protocol was finalised (1997), China’s GDP per capita was 25 per cent of the world’s figure and, by 2020, the two figures were almost equal.
China, on the other hand, has opined that it is still a developing country according to the guidelines of the UNFCCC and that Article 9 (of the Paris Agreement) says that resource transfer has to take place from the developed to developing countries. Mercifully, India has not yet been called out, though there is a good probability that India, too, may be asked to contribute instead of being a recipient of climate funds. There is little doubt that the real intention of this debate as to who all should contribute to the fund is to delay matters further when it comes to resource transfer. Sorting out this issue could take years and at the receiving end is the developing world, the small island states in particular, as their land mass is fast disappearing due to the rising sea level.
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