Hira Bahadur Thapa

The two-week long conference of the parties to UNFCCCUN (Framework Convention on Climate Change) at Glasgow has ended with mixed results. On some grounds, the agreement has raised hope that countries are becoming serious about curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. But on several areas, disappointment still prevails because pledges are falling far shorter than is actually required. Climate crisis has assumed alarming proportions as evidenced by recent disasters like heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods. The Glasgow conference took place against this gloom. The final pact failed to outline a clear pathway to stop the world from breaching 1.5-degree mark or adequately answer how countries must share the responsibility of curbing emissions.

However, the architects of the agreement hoped that it would send a powerful signal to capitals and corporate boardrooms across the globe that more ambitious action on climate change has no alternative. This could also empower civil society groups and lawmakers working to shift countries away from dirty fossil fuels that emit planet-warming emissions to cleaner sources of energy like wind, solar and nuclear power.

One of the two major achievements of Glasgow Climate Pact is the promise of countries to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions. More importantly, the agreement urges wealthy nations to “at least double” funding to protect poor nations from the hazards of hotter planet. For the first time, the Glasgow Climate Pact mentions by name in a quarter century of climate negotiations the main cause of climate change: fossil fuels. Disappointedly though the dirtiest of them the coal would not be phased out but phased down as the document shows in its last minute compromise.

Dangerous path
But analysts opine that it did not succeed in helping the world avert the worst effects of climate change. Even if countries fulfill all the emissions promises they have made in Glasgow, they still put the world on a dangerous path toward a planet that will be warmer by some 2.4 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. Scientists predict that the world has become warmer by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) already compared to pre-industrial levels and keeping the rise in global temperature within the limit of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit as per the Paris Accord by the end of this century would be a hard nut to crack. That limit is the threshold to avert the worst consequences of warming like worsening storms, wildfires, droughts and sea level rise as well as the social and economic upheaval that would accompany a widening climate crisis.

During contentious negotiations, one of the sticky issues to resolve was how much responsibility should the industrialised countries, the historical emitters for more than 170 years, should bear in reducing emissions and financing the poor countries adapt to climate change. A group of rich countries with just 12 per cent of the global population today produced half of all greenhouse gases in the past 170 years. A quarter of all emissions came from the US alone and that is why its role in fighting climate change remains crucial. Over the years swiftly industrialising nations like China and India, among others, are emitting significant amount of carbon emissions and have thus owe increasing responsibility of curbing the planet-heating gases more than others.

While the large emitters of carbon emissions decline to come up with ambitious carbon reduction targets, the poor developing nations, and more so the group of 47 least developed ones, which emit far less than they absorb are facing the worst consequences of climate change. Nonetheless, their appeal for making available funding to help them adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change has not been appropriately taken care of. In this regard, the LDC group has strongly argued for climate financing which the wealthiest economies pledged to mobilise $100 billion per year by 2020 a decade ago to help poorer countries cope with the hazards of hotter planet.

The Least Developed Countries, Nepal being one of them, fought a hard battle for a separate fund paid for by wealthy countries to compensate them for the damage they can’t prevent. Melting glaciers from the Himalayas are threatening the lives of people living in the low land areas of Nepal and off seasonal rains have already created havoc by flooding the rice fields when the farmers were preparing for their harvest.

Funding mechanism
The issue of loss and damage has been under discussions for some years in climate negotiations. It has not made any headway in Glasgow as rich nations fear that establishing a specific funding mechanism for loss and damage could open the door to a flood of liability claims. After forceful resistance from the US and the EU, the final pact did not include funding to compensate the developing countries for the losses they are already incurring and that they will continue to incur. The US and the European Union, the major emitters have argued that the world will never be able to minimise the damage from global warming unless swiftly industrializing nations like China and India do more to slash their emissions. Both China and India counter that their per capita emissions and shares of historical emissions are low compared to historical emitters.

Given such diverse national interests and the domestic politics that heavily influence the climate policies, the question of whether the world will make significant progress to slow global warming still comes down to the action of a handful powerful nations that remain at odds over how best to address climate crisis. Combating climate change hinges on whether world leaders stick to their promises, especially when there are no formal mechanisms in place to ensure they meet their goals.

(Thapa was foreign relations advisor to the Prime Minister from 2008-09. thapahira17@gmail.com)