High stakes for India as key climate meet begins
As G20 remains mum on climate, action shifts to COP24 in Poland
NEW DELHI: India will be at the forefront of negotiations as a leading developing country to push for climate action when talks begin on Monday in Poland’s Katowice at COP 24, which multiple climate scientists are calling a “make or break” moment for the world.
This is because an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in October, titled ‘Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees’, warned that the Earth will face devastating consequences of climate change if the world fails to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels.
The report also said that commitments to cutting down carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, submitted by 195 nations under the Paris Agreement of 2015, which is to become operational as the Paris Accord in 2020, will fail to keep global temperatures in check.
Due to human activity since the pre-industrial level, the world has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius.
Discussions at the Katowice conference of parties (COP 24) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are also crucial because the US — the world’s second most polluting nation after China — has threatened to pull out of the Paris Agreement, and that would mean the rest of the stakeholders will have to strive to meet climate goals on their own in the future.
In the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires last week, the US reiterated its decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and affirmed its commitment to economic growth and energy access and security.
India is one of the worst-affected by climate change because of its large population and a high share of poverty.
This is why Indian climate scientists are pushing for the draft- ing of rules for the implementation of the Paris Agreement in this COP.
The Union ministry of earth sciences recently said that the Kerala floods were a result of climate change and that similar extreme weather events can happen again in India.
The UN 1.5-degree report also warned that India will be one of the worst affected by heat stress.
Crops, plantations, even livestock in 151 districts, or slightly more than one-fifth of the total districts in India, are susceptible to the impact of climate change, according to an annual review by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), a wing of the agriculture ministry.
The effects of climate change on India’s agriculture, which employs half the population and accounts for 17% of the country’s economic output, are no longer about distant projections.
The latest research, cited by the ICAR study, shows the impact of climate change will be increasingly felt , as demonstrated by extreme weather events — and manifest itself in economic, political, even social consequences.
The consequences of a 1.5-degree rise include extreme temperature in many regions, increase in frequency or amount of heavy precipitation in some areas and droughts in others. If the increase reaches 2 degrees, the impacts can be too serious for communities to adapt to.