Cement, Energy and Environment

.t) ' In all the hullaballoo on the L&D mechanism, the developing world also lost something much bigger on how the world is going to reduce emissions from now till 2020 and then beyond 2020. At the Durban COP in 2010, the world had agreed to set up an Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) to finalize a legal agreement by 2015 to cut emissions from 2020 onwards. Under ADP, countries are also discussing to increase their mitigation ambition for near term - pre-2020 - to bridge the 'gigatonne gap'. The gap represents how much countries have pledged under the Cancun Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions till 2020 and what science demands to avoid catastrophic climate change. Negotiations on the pre-2020 front were damaged severely in the first week of the talks itself. Developed countries not only failed to ratify the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol as promised at Doha, but some even backtracked on their past commitments. Japan, instead of its earlier commitment of reducing emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 relative to the 1990 levels, brought this down to only 3.8 per cent from its 2005 level by 2020. This is actually an increase of 3.1 per cent over the 1990 levels. Australia had said that it would reduce its emissions by up to 25 per cent with respect to 2000 levels by 2020 if countries like India and China pledge mitigation actions as well. India and China have put forward their pledges, but now Australia wants to reduce its emissions by only 5 percent. Other developed countries maintained the status quo. The EU, which has already met its target for 2020, did not increase its ambition ; the US' target remains somewhere between 0 and 3 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. Low ambition from the developed countries meant that the 'gigatonne gap' would remain. A clear demand of major developing countries such as India and China was that developed countries step up their targets to close the gigatonne gap. But the clear lack of progress on this front further strained the trust deficit between developed and developing countries and lent to the weak outcome in the post-2020 track. Central to the disagreement under the post- 2020 track was the question of whether major developing countries like India and China should undertake voluntary "action" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or come on board with rich countries and take up binding "commitments" to do so. India's strategy of using 'equity' as a negotiating tool to avoid binding international commitments backfired 1n Warsaw. In a choreographed negotiating strategy, developed countries pushed India to the wall where India agreed to 'contribution' by all countries. 'Contribution' signals the voluntary nature of the agreement, meaning every country will now have an option to propose whatever emissions reduction target it wants. However, as these contributions will apply to both developed and developing countries , this further erases the differentiation between them, one that India has fought hard to retain for the past two decades. Furthermore, the final text of the Warsaw CoP makes no explicit mention of the key principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capability (CBDR-RC) under the UNFCCC, a milestone that the developed countries have reached in diluting the differentiation between the industrialised countries and their developing counterparts. The worst part is that all countries, most importantly developed countries, will lower their mitigation ambition for the post 2020 deal. The world, therefore, is likely to see "mega gigatonne gap" post 2020 which will have disastrous consequences for the poor in the developing countries like India. The only saving grace of Warsaw CoP was an outcome on ways to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, popularly called REDO+. The mechanism aims to provide monetary incentives to forest communities for protecting forests, which are major carbon sinks. The framework agreed to at Warsaw puts in place a rulebook for REDO+ projects, but how forest communities will grapple with the ground realities of such rules is not yet clear. For instance, the framework will give results-based finance to the communities. Under this approach, payments will be made after communities establish that they have reduced emissions by protecting forests. This potentially opens up the entire REDO+ mechanism to markets-based funding and carbon credits. If this happens, then carbon storage in forests (for instance, through fast growing plantations) will ?ride the imperatives of conservation of natural forests and biodiversity.