India’s opportunity to play key role at COP27

NEW DELHI: India has a huge opportunity to play a leadership role at COP27, this year’s signature global conference on climate change that kicked off on November 6 in Sharm-elsheikh, Egypt, according to veteran journalist Bill Spindle. Spindle talked about his expectations for this year’s conference on this week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast co-produced by the Carnegie Endowment and the Hindustan Times.

India “is in the throes of experiencing climate change impact and damage, on the one hand, and yet it is also very much in the throes of a quite amazing, aggressive move into renewable energy,” noted Spindle. “India is making huge progress in that, and they really are making an impact both in their own country and globally in terms of the energy transition.”

Spindle is the Climate and Energy Editor at the new journalism start-up, Semafor. He previously spent 10 years at the Wall Street Journal, where he served as South Asia Bureau Chief from 2016 to 2020. For much of the past year, Spindle crisscrossed India — travelling more than 8,000km by train — to understand the transformation of India’s energy sector. For India, “the real trick is not so much what happens today, tomorrow, next week, beyond next year, as much as what happens after 2030 as more and more Indians get connected to the power system, as their energy use begins reaching the norms of China,” notes Spindle. “If [Indians] are still addicted to coal… we’re going to see an explosion of emissions. That’s a huge problem, first and foremost for Indians, because they’re among the countries that are most vulnerable.”

As proceedings are underway in Sharm-el-sheikh, Spindle noted a huge question mark hangs over this year’s climate summit. Rich nations are pushing for poor countries to announce greater cuts to carbon emissions, but developing countries claim that their developed counterparts have stiffed them when it comes to climate finance.

Aside from the usual major powers whose presence looms large at global climate negotiations — the United States, European Union, China, and India — Spindle argued that Africa is the wild card to watch this year.

“This will be... the Africa COP. Egypt is in Africa. Sub-saharan Africa is really the epitome of regions that contributed virtually nothing whatsoever to the climate problem and yet are suffering the most damages and they’re the most vulnerable countries and they have the east resources to deal with it,” explained Spindle. “That will define this COP.”