With highly evolving World, the world strategy even for implementing the very constant goals it continues to stand for, will have to change with time.
The climate change and its effects have been revolving around in news and minds alike. With its nefarious work at play in the background, one or the other of its effects keep resurfacing and destroying human lives.
Well, the global carbon system is an inter-connected, interlocked one, wherein anything undertaken has a spill-over effect, potentially somewhere else.
Even a single transition in economy may have an impact on another economy or maybe the effects are visible as a change in the politics of one place or the other.
And this ‘follower’ approach is anyhow good because no single country can itself correct the very wrongs done by an entire human race. There is an utter need for Climate consensus.
There is a need for the global leadership to be shaped by the very policies and governance approach of a nation that is cognizant, wary and compassionate of the growing impact of climate change.
How can India take up this role?
According to IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), India stands vulnerable to several impacts of climate change: rising seas, increased dust storms, frequent cyclones, changed and disrupted weather patterns including scanty or heavy rainfall, recurrent floods, reducing crop yields etc.
As per TERI and IPCC report: “As sea levels are rising, most Asian deltas are sinking as a result of groundwater extraction, floodplain engineering and trapping of sediments by dams”.
“Severe floods in Mumbai in 2005 have been attributed to both climatic and non-climatic factors. Changes of sea level in the Indian Ocean have emerged since the 1960s, driven by changing wind patterns.”
Vulnerability of any Nation to the perils of climate change, is basically a function of sensitivity and adaptive capacity.
India has been facing some of the highest disaster risks in the world, ranking 29th out of 191 countries in Inform Risk Index 2019.
Particular to India’s case, high levels of socioeconomic deprivation have been feeding on this geographical susceptibility of the Nation though it scores markedly better in terms of its coping capacity.
However, as a signatory to global agreement on climate change, India has a responsibility to take global appropriate action but, in the world, full of aversions to Multilateralism and inward-looking policies, how can India reach out for global Climate consensus?
India has the advantage of being world’s big market and a huge economy, hosts the second largest population.
Amongst the world powers clashing over trade acts and countries fighting proxy wars, India has rather taken a side for larger good of the people worldwide.
For instance, in Afghanistan, where bigger Nations like US, Russia, China assert their presence rather rigidly, it is India that has greater love within their population.
It has quietly built libraries, ports, hospitals and all that can be termed philanthropy to help the people stuck in war, investing approximately $10.8 billion as of 2012.
Now, India needs to step ahead for more, the climate change and global warming shall be pushed to the top of its foreign policy agenda. And in this process, India can draw benefits for its own.
For example: Germany’s domestic programme to lower the price of Renewables supported global prices for renewables and benefits were significantly drawn.
Though known for its Red-tapism, India’s diplomacy and its representatives abroad have earned an accolade always. India can make use of this asset to assert its own legacy for Climate change.
Climate Diplomacy: A preventive diplomacy with India as its ambassador
Newly acknowledged climate crisis is a global issue, traversing through diverse areas of international and foreign policy.
As per European Commission, four requisites for Climate diplomacy are:
A staunch commitment to multilateralism in climate policy.
Recognition of climate change impacts on peace and security in World.
Increasing domestic action on Climate change can provide an impetus to global support.
Advocating climate cooperation though outreach to different regions.
It means prioritizing the climate action with all stakeholders worldwide – engaging in diplomatic dialogues, public diplomacy and utilizing the external policy instruments for greater climate good.
India’s changed stance over years has been observed from a mere antagonist to environmental colonialism in the 1990s to being the torchbearer for Climate resilience.
There was a time when the Developed countries blamed the budding developing countries like India and China for the rise in global temperatures.
Therefore, India advocated for “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) and in the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm of Sweden in June 1972, Indian PM Indira Gandhi pronounced a climate policy.
It prioritized socio-economic development over environmental protection looking at poverty-ridden country and asked the industrial countries to take principal responsibility for a deteriorating environment, including global warming.
India clearly asserted how the fixation of the western world on industrialization and tools of aggressive economic growth have been the profound reasons for rise of environmental concerns at the global level.
India was a part of the countries undertaking intergovernmental negotiating committee which led to UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
India understood that its ‘climate diplomacy’ could not condone its national interests, rather help achieve them successfully. India setting precedent, even said that as developing world’s emissions will rise once they begin to remove poverty and undertake development.
India set the requisite for Kyoto protocol talking that any convention in future should rather abridge the gap through technology transfers from the western world to the global south to help them meet their respective developmental challenges.
India professed an equitable solution to tackle GHG emissions worldwide: the developing world to reduce their per capita emissions and offset them using the per capita emissions of developing world.
Its time again that India can draw its own line while engaging countries of similar concern and facing similar problems. India’s rendezvous in African continent has its own story to tell.
India and Africa connection for limiting Climate change: a story worth telling
Both believe that since Climate change is not a problem confined within territorial boundaries, the solution to such bigger problem also needs a transnational approach.
It is disheartening to know that Africa is one of the lowest contributors to world pollution but one of the biggest sufferers of climate change.
Africa being resource-rich depends on its innate resources for sustenance, hence any depletion of its natural resource, degradation of land and environment has caused the continent immense anxiety and have been at the center of major conflicts in the region like Chad, Sudan, Darfur and Ethiopia.
The shrinking of the Nile, Orange, Zambezi and Kunene has led to frequent clashes among varied groups. Similarly, in case of sea level rise, the sustainability of Lagos, Banjul, Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion and Madagascar would be threatened.
India-Africa Forum Summit (IASF) III or Indian Ocean Renewable Ministerial (IORM) can help India to earn a footprint and goodwill in the African continent, the land of dreams for all nations looking for some resource extraction.
Hereby, the climate change offers India a bundle of opportunities to assist Africa in mitigation and adaptation to these challenges on its way, help in the peace process and emerge a voice for Climate when no other leader is at such critical forefront in an ultimate battlefield.
ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), a group of 10 small nations in South-east Asia, is central to geopolitics in the region, limiting China against its expansionist aspirations.
However, being home to all critical tropical forests, endemic species and facing the wrath of Climate change, it can in some time, lose its highly-earned economic prosperity to global warming, rising seas and aggrieved weather patterns.
It can align with India on this endeavor and surely many countries can contrive with this budding nation, to earn Climate consensus.
India has a legacy of its own, it has been a survivor of Cold war, that too in its own penchant style. When the world was made to survive only under the refuge of two enemy Nations during Cold war, India remained a sovereign of its own and accepted servitude to none.
Instead, it took others under its refuge, promoting NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) and created its own liberating faction denouncing every possible form of neo-Colonialism.
Climate change can no longer be just viewed from the environmental and economic angle; it can better yield the strategic considerations.
If India starts focusing on its neighborhood to be constructive and innovative through its Neighborhood First policy, making even climate change an integral part of its foreign policy ethics, it can surely gain an upper ground as a sensitive and responsible global leader.