And who will foot this bill?

Doing the math

The figures that are floating in a background paper are astounding, the math mind-boggling. To maintain status quo of the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by 2030, the world would need $210 billion every year. Most of it will have to be spent in developing countries, as that is where the growth is. With one new coal-fired plant each day, China is soon going to surpass the US as the number one consumer of energy. India’s own math is even more astounding — it will need 2.5 trillion dollars by 2036 for a 10 per cent cut in emissions. Even though India may not have legally binding targets, it cannot escape new, tougher standards for cars, plugging leakages in electricity in homes and modern technology for the most polluting industries. The question to which nobody has an answer yet is — who exactly will foot this bill?

Team India

There is a team of bureaucrats that represent India in these climate negotiations. It is headed by R.H. Khwaja, additional secretary from the ministry of environment. New to these negotiations, he is still trying to familiarise himself with climate change jargon, which to put it mildly, is plentiful. It is not very difficult, he says. His logic is simple: the geography of the world is the same on every issue. The rich and the poor, or the North and the South. The North does not act enough and India has to keep reminding them on this. He has experience in bio-safety negotiations. It is hard to lose your bearings when the signposts are the same for every international negotiation.

Bonding over forests

What do India and Papua New Guinea have in common? It is their stand on forests in the climate change debate. When the Kyoto protocol was negotiated, it was decided that countries would only get incentives if they had cut all their trees and wanted to replant them. It did not recognise efforts to conserve existing trees. A country like Papua New Guinea realised that its coffee industry thrived on people clearing more forests. They needed to compensate people in return for not cutting trees. A study of the protocol made them realise that there was no such incentive for preserving forests, as did India, which has a decent record on deforestation. Now they are both working together to push for incentives for conserving forests under the new Kyoto commitment period. Give us money to conserve forests, not to cut and then replant them, say the two allies.

Problem with take-off

The latest to attract attention of climate negotiators are the fuel-guzzling aircrafts. They are all talking options — technology, taxation, and rationing to control emissions from aircrafts. Major international airlines will discuss this later this month. Aviation contributes about 3 per cent of global carbon emissions, but air travel is growing at some 5 per cent a year. Right now, there are voluntary emission reductions where it is possible to “offset” your emissions by calculating how much you have emitted while flying and then paying up for a project to introduce biogas in a village in India that would save the same amount.

But now, the world has to go beyond these token efforts to harsher policy measures. This is an issue to watch out in the next few months.