BAKU: Pointing at rich nations’ unwillingness to engage on critical issues of climate finance and mitigation during the past week at COP29, India said that it would not be possible for developing countries to make progress on climate action unless they are provided with “means of implementation” (finance and technological support) by their developed counterparts.
“If there are no means of implementation, there can be no climate action. How can we discuss climate action when it is being made impossible for us to act, even as our challenges in dealing with the impacts of climate change are increasing?” asked India while making its statement in the closing plenary on mitigation ambition and its implementation.
Blaming the rich nations, who have the highest capacity to take climate action, for “continuously shifting goalposts, delaying climate action, and consuming a highly disproportionate share of the global carbon budget,” the country’s lead negotiator in his statement said, “We now have to meet our developmental needs in a situation of increasingly depleting carbon budget and increasing impacts of climate change. We are being asked to increase mitigation ambition by those who have shown no such ambition, either in their own mitigation ambition and implementation, nor in providing the means of implementation.”
Aligning India’s stance with the views expressed by the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs), the Arab Group, and the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), he said, “This bottom-up approach is being attempted to be made into a top-down approach, in turn attempting to turn the whole mandate of the mitigation work programme (MWP) and the principles of the Paris Agreement upside down.”
India’s reaction came on Saturday after the developed countries insisted on including mitigation paras from Global Stocktake at COP28 into the MWP - a ploy of rich nations to corner the developing countries on climate action even as they failed to deliver even their earlier promise to mobilise $100 billion per year.
Expressing serious concern about the progress COP29 made during the week, India’s negotiator said, “We saw no progress in matters that are critical for developing countries. Our part of the world is facing some of the worst impacts of climate change, with far lower capacity to recover from those impacts or to adapt to the changes to the climatic system for which we are not responsible.
“We notice a tendency to ignore the decisions taken in the past – related to the Sharm el-Sheikh mitigation ambition and implementation work programme at COP27 and the context of the Global Stocktake in the Paris Agreement, where it informs the parties for undertaking climate actions.”