Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Funds needed from developed countries to tackle global warming' that was published in Newsband

Funds needed from developed countries to tackle global warming

Bonn climate meet was a success. Alliances were formed for phasing out coal; putting up green buildings and accelerating eco-mobility. The developing countries stood as a solid bloc and forced the rich countries to disclose how much of funds they would transfer, and tell the world what they have done to combat global warming. All these mean satisfactory progress towards implementation of the Paris Agreement

The national actions require cross-border funding and technology flows. The US — the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter — is in the process of leaving the Paris pact, and China, the second biggest, while making a big show of shutting down coal plants on its soil, is building more elsewhere in the world.

The developed countries are singularly responsible for the climate mess. Developing countries need money and know-how for dealing with climatic effects. The next meeting at Katowice, Poland, is to finalise the “rulebook” for implementing the Paris accord. Bonn had little cheer for India.

Now, all the things to do under ‘dealing with climate change’ fall into three broad categories: mitigation, adaptation and loss & damage. Mitigation is all about limiting further rise in global temperature. This involves phasing out fossil fuels and shifting to renewables, electric vehicles, green buildings etc. Adaptation is about what to do to cope with the effects of climate change that are already upon us, or bracing ourselves for floods, droughts and diseases. Loss and damage (L&D) is about all the repair work that would need to be done after a certain climate event, say a hurricane, hits a place.

India is particularly vulnerable to climate risks. North India will be visited upon alternately by floods and droughts if the Himalayan glaciers melt (they are melting). South India is already experiencing the deleterious effects of erratic monsoons.

Guess how much the fund has given out in the ten years of its operations? $462 million. At Bonn, Germany contributed €50 million to the Fund — it is like offering a banana to a hungry elephant. The Green Climate Fund, set up in 2010 with target of making available $100 billion annually by 2020, has so far collected a corpus of $9.2 billion — cumulatively, in the last seven years. It has so far allocated a paltry $2.65 billion to 54 projects (including $35 million to a water project in Odisha.)

Arivudai Nambi Appadurai, who heads India Adaptation Strategy at World Resources Institute, notes that India, which has 121 highly climate-vulnerable agro-climatic zones, urgently needs to pay attention to adaptation. India has its own National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change with ₹531 crore from the Budget. Appadurai says that the demand is so high that the government cannot manage from its own resources. India needs to seek more multilateral funding from the developed world.

After being flat for three years, global carbon emissions from human activities are slated to grow 2 per cent to 41 billion tonnes this year. This is mainly because of increased emissions from China, which is witnessing a spurt in industrial growth. While carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel and industry in China are expected to rise about 3.5 per cent, after about two years of economic slowdown, India’s contribution to the atmospheric build-up would go up by nearly 2 per cent,

In the US and EU, on the other hand, emissions came down by 0.4 per cent and 0.2 per cent respectively. They grew 1.9 per cent in the rest of world.