Climate talks as shortchanging international law

#GS-03 Climate Change

Developing Countries and Climate Change:

There are three problems with the current negotiating process.
First, citizens in developed countries are not even aware that two-thirds of their national emissions of carbon dioxide come from their diet, transport, and residential and commercial sectors.
Second, the process ignores that global well-being will also follow urbanisation of the developing country’s population, requiring fossil fuels for infrastructure and energy to achieve comparable levels.
Third, the need for vast quantities of cement and steel in developing countries for infrastructure constituting essential emissions, as they urbanise is not being considered.
As late urbanisers, developing countries account for more than half the annual emissions and most emissions growth.
They cannot affordably access many of the new technologies to decarbonise quickly.

The objective of the Climate Treaty is to avoid a concentration of cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide, prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system and enable sustainable economic development.
The Paris Agreement (2015) agreed to a 1.5°C global temperature goal.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 recommended that net emissions needed to zero out around 2050.
In Glasgow, in 2021, negotiators zeroed in on coal to reduce future emissions.
This initiative was not based on science and it ignored the key finding of the IPCC on the centrality of the carbon budget.

Carbon Budget is the cumulative emissions associated with a specific amount of global warming that scientifically links the temperature goal to national action.
Carbon budgets are robust as they can be estimated accurately from climate models.
And, they are the most useful for policy as they couple the climate to the economy consistent with the science of both.