United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been holding climate conferences annually, and this year’s CoP 30 is scheduled to be held at Belem, a Brazilian city on the Pacific coast, from 10th to 21st November. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, in collaboration with the UN Global Compact, Karnataka Forest Department, and Government of India’s Wood Science & Technology Institute, organised two days of deliberation on 14th and 15th October to determine national priorities for CoP 30. Experts and stakeholders, including this author, participated in the deliberations. Various topics concerning mitigation and adaptation of climate change impacts, such as national adaptation plans while heatwaves are increasingly severe, impact on the lives of communities while Himalayan glaciers retreat, impact of greenhouse gas emissions on planetary and human health, conserving forests and biodiversity, the need for upscaling renewable and nuclear energy, and climate finance were discussed.
The emissions of greenhouse gases since industrialisation began in 1870 have made the planet warmer by 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is causing droughts, changing monsoon patterns, retreating glaciers, and the resulting heatwaves, wildfires, flooding and landslides, cyclones and typhoons have been disrupting lives and livelihoods of the communities in different regions.
The year 2024 has recorded the highest rise in average global temperature, i.e. 1.54 degrees Celsius, and we have seen during the current monsoon months how different regions in the Himalayas have faced destruction due to heavy downpours, flooding and landslides. In every CoP meeting, the goalpost is found to have been changed. The Himalayas were reported to be losing their glaciers fully by 2035 and used to be in focus for discussions in earlier CoPs. Once it was established that the studies were misleading and the retreat of glaciers was not taking place at that fast a pace, the discussions on the Himalayas were omitted in subsequent CoPs. However, it should now be brought in for discussion, as melting of permafrost in the Tibetan region is quite at an alarming rate, causing shrinkages in extent and degrading its stability. It has significant impacts on the local environment, hydrological changes, soil stability, and potential release of stored carbon.
Dr Meenakshi Negi, Head of Karnataka Forest Force, in her inaugural address, pitched for the protection of forest resources and to bring down the dependency of the communities on forests.
As long as communities residing in and around forests are dependent on the resources, forest conservation is a challenge. Allowing the grabbing of forest land through faulty implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 is damaging the carbon sequestration potential. Forests are one of the best and cheapest sinks for carbon, and deforestation negates the advantage.
Worldwide, 391 million hectares of tropical forests, on which 53 million people are dependent, are at high risk of deforestation. Forests, vital for carbon storage and ecosystem services, are under threat from agriculture and development. It is essential to protect them for climate mitigation, water security and avoiding economic losses.
The Department of Statistics and Plan Implementation, Government of India, has erroneously concluded from Forest Survey of India’s biannual reports that the carbon sequestration potential of India’s forests has gone up by 51 per cent in ten years. The studies conducted by other institutions on India’s forests do not support these findings. Many projects in forest areas, like the Sharavathy Pump Storage Project, Hubballi-Ankola rail link, and widening of several roads, etc., are in the pipeline for implementation. The deliberations in the Pre-CoP 30 opposed the diversion of pristine forests for such development projects.
On the sidelines of CoP 26 at Glasgow in 2021, countries controlling 90 per cent of global forests decided to end deforestation by 2030. India, though it did not sign this agreement, and the leaders who were signatories to the agreement never reviewed the progress on the occasion of subsequent CoP meetings. It only indicates that they are under domestic pressure to upscale development and achieve higher GDP at the expense of forests.
Dr J Srinivasan, ex-IISc Professor, made observations on the challenges of mitigation from heatwaves. Carbon dioxide concentration has been going up every year, with the only exception during the COVID period. In the event of heatwaves occurring sequentially for longer durations, the aged population and children become more vulnerable and die.
Urban areas, where richer people live, are generally surrounded by tree groves; they also live in air-conditioned houses, while slums hardly have trees, making them more vulnerable to death. In 2020, Ahmedabad registered unprecedented human deaths due to heatwaves, and the government-organised shelters provided considerable relief. Humid heatwaves are a bigger challenge, when the temperature is more than 37 degrees Celsius and humidity more than 50 per cent. Many human bodies cannot withstand this pressure and succumb. Srikakulam once experienced this, which led to the casualty of young children and infants.
Experts also explained the relative impact of each of the greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, water vapour and fluorinated gases. Methane is emitted from cow rearing and paddy growing. Carbon dioxide is largely responsible for warming, and methane’s contribution to the emission is less than 1 per cent. Often Western narratives accuse India of methane emission. Our contribution to global emission is negligible and is for our survival and not for luxury. Indian negotiators at CoP 30 can outsmart the Western narratives and put their foot down whenever they are asked to cut methane emissions.
Climate finance is another issue that had led to the failure of talks at CoP 29 at Baku. Ms Chandani Raina, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, connected with the delegates of Pre-CoP 30 online and spoke about financing developing countries for mitigation and adaptation. Developed countries’ commitment during the Copenhagen CoP in 2009 to provide $100 billion annually has not been fully complied with.
Hardly 15 to 20 per cent of the commitment has been fulfilled since 2021. When the Global South pushed for $1.3 trillion from 2025 at Baku, developed countries agreed to mobilise $300 billion annually from 2026 onwards, discontinuing the commitment made at Copenhagen for annual finance of $100 billion. With the insistence of developed countries, CoP 29 at Baku further added that 40 per cent of the annual finance will have a shareholding of developing countries, which will be financed through loans, thereby creating a debt trap for these countries. It was further added that the demand of the developing countries for $1.3 trillion annually will be finalised in the next annual meet - from Baku to Belem.
Also, developed countries advanced the goal of carbon space made available for developing countries to grow. Developed countries are no longer committing finance; instead, they are agreeing to mobilise, leaving developing countries to face climate disruptions and ruin their economies.
Chirag Dhara, Krea University, Chennai, presented a study conducted by him and his four colleagues and introduced a novel framework to assess the global mean surface warming that would have resulted if the historical lifestyles of individual countries had been the norm for the entire global population.
They found that universalising the carbon-intensive lifestyles of industrialised countries would have pushed the world beyond the 1.5-degree threshold as early as the 1950s in some cases and by the 2000s for many others, thereby risking significant destabilisation of the earth’s climate system.
They concluded that the modest lifestyles of the global majority have contributed substantially to the experienced planetary stability, which provides a critical window for climate action extending from a decade to a century.
This study is an important tool to convince developed countries to immediately decarbonise their economies and to enable developing countries to use the remaining carbon space for their growth.
The writer is retired Head of Karnataka Forest Force and presently teaches ‘Economics’ in Karnataka Forest Academy