Modi, Xi can make climate history

Modi has taken steps to enhance targets of solar energy generation to 175 GW by 2022, making all new vehicles electric by 2040, focusing on implementation of climate resilient farming for small and marginal farmers and making 100 cities smart and clean, w

In the 21st century, the best hope for halting planetary-scale disaster due to unstoppable global warming may just be round the corner, through disruptive politics.

Multilateral diplomacy over the last three decades has failed to take corrective action on climate change. The mega mandate given to Narendra Modi by the Indian people and the perennial leadership guaranteed by China to Xi Jinping give promise of such diplomacy to address climate change, which the United Nations calls the defining challenge of our times.

Riverside diplomacy between Modi and Xi is making history. It started on the banks of the Sabarmati river in September 2014, followed by the ‘informal’ summit in Wuhan on the banks of Yangtze river in April 2018. Their third such summit is likely to be in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganga river in October 2019. Like the earlier riverine summits resulted in problem-solving exercises, the Varanasi summit has potential to cool the warming world.

The ‘climate of change’ may finally be here, as the world witnesses the growing strength of the global youth movement’s pleas to adults to take responsibility to protect the climate. These protests cannot go unheeded by leaders of two nations where youth dominates, in numbers and in their potential to cause social upheaval.

The world faces an existential threat due to rise in sea levels, floods, droughts, extreme heat and loss of life. May 2019 saw the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere crossing 415 ppm, an historic level never seen before in human civilisation. Undeterred by these events, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington was walking away from the Paris treaty. However, the leaders of India and China, with 40% of the world’s population, are poised to show the way and take a lead to accelerate decarbonisation by deriving benefits from the new, clean and smart world order.

Xi, amidst China’s obsession of getting rich through ‘social capitalism,’ had the courage not only to propose creation of his pet project of ‘shared future through ecological civilization,’ but also to initiate a pilot in the Pu’er prefecture of Yunnan province, to assess the validity of ecological civilization. China has already reached, by the end of 2018, a solar PV target of 165 GW.

There has been electrifying progress in electric vehicles (EVs), which provide additional benefit by reducing air pollution in cities like Beijing. Nearly 1.3 million new EVs were sold in China, out of 4 million worldwide, making China the world leader. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is now being assessed for its impact on climate change.

Modi and Xi ensured success of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Both insisted on including, in the preamble of the Paris Treaty, the concepts of sustainable lifestyles and climate-justice in addressing global warming.

Modi has taken steps to enhance targets of solar energy generation to 175 GW by 2022, making all new vehicles electric by 2040, focusing on implementation of climate resilient farming for small and marginal farmers and making 100 cities smart and clean, with a reduced carbon footprint. His leadership in formulating the International Solar Alliance with French Presidents Francois Hollande and then Emmanuel Macron has proved to be a unique inter-governmental mechanism to raise ambitions for early global decarbonization.

Global leaders, under the Paris Agreement, agreed to limit global warming to below 2° C, compared to preindustrial is at ion levels, and trying their best to keep the rise below 1.5 deg C. Their pledges have been miserably inadequate.

The IPCC special report in October 2018 clearly maps out what must be done to keep temperature rise below 1.5 deg C. The world needs to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 and come down to zero by 2050.

To move towards such decarbonization goals, the world needs leaders who are completely committed. Modi and Xi can provide a jump start to this process.

Both leaders met recently in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, again at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, and will meet again in Paris in August, as invitees to the G-7 summit, before they engage in riverine diplomacy in Varanasi, India. Both Modi and Xi thus have the opportunity to get like-minded leaders like Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and French President Macron on their side to make climate transformation happen.