SC refuses to entertain plea on Telangana issue

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a PIL challenging Union Cabinet’s decision to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh to carve out a separate Telangana state.

A bench of justices H.L. Dattu and Madan B. Lokur said the petition filed against bifurcation of the state is pre-mature as Parliament and state legislature are still to pass it.

“We don’t know the mind of state legislature or Parliament and what they will do. Its pre-mature,” the bench said.

It, however, said that all legal issues raised in the petition are kept open to be argued at an appropriate stage.

“We decline to entertain the petition. However, we clarify that all legal issues raised in the petition are kept open to be argued in appropriate petitions at appropriate stage,” the bench said.

The petition was filed by D.A. Somayajulu, currently serving as a member of Political Affairs Committee of YSR Congress, challenging the Centre’s move to carve out Telangana from Andhra Pradesh, saying it was an arbitrary and irrational decision resulting in large scale protests, loss of life and revenue across the state.

The petition had sought directions for declaring the Cabinet resolution of October 3 as being unconstitutional.

It had also sought direction for restraining the President from initiating any recommendation in terms of Article 3 for the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and creating Telangana until a rational policy on the creation of states is laid down.

Further, the petition had said the present decision to divide Andhra Pradesh is clearly based on political motivations of the Congress that leads the coalition government at the Centre and cannot be defended against a challenge based on Article 14 of the Constitution.

The petition, which was settled by senior advocate Harish Salve, had contended that “Article 3 of the Constitution cannot be invoked as a political tool to cleave a political division for the purposes of the party at the Centre”.

“A creation of a new State has to be based on valid and tenable considerations emanating from a policy regarding the creation of States. In the absence of such a policy, the creation of a new state (or states) will be invalid,” it had said.

Bring the CBI under the Lokpal

A Lokpal with the CBI under it may not be a panacea for all our ills, but it is the first of many steps towards ushering in good governance

The recent Gauhati High Court judgment and K.M. Birla versus the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the coal allocation issue have once again brought to the fore Anna Hazare’s campaign for the Lokpal Bill — and, put the focus back on the autonomy, functioning and, now, the legal structure and very existence of the CBI. Anna Hazare repeatedly said he was not demanding a change of government as he believed that successive governments would be more corrupt. His aim was good governance and systemic changes. The Lokpal Bill with an autonomous CBI under its watch was one of them.

It is amply evident now — and Anna stands vindicated — that not only is corruption behind all scandals but is also at the root of all ills such as appalling poverty, malnutrition, dismal rural health care, etc. You fix corruption, you fix most things. Though very naive and simplistic, it makes sense.

The spate of scams that surfaced during the rule of the United Progressive Alliance — from 2G and coal allocation to AgustaWestland — have given rise to apprehensions on two counts. One, how can anyone trust a system in which those accused of corruption have to grant permission to investigating agencies to investigate them or their accomplices? And, two, the investigative agencies have to take orders from the very accused who control and manage them.

Autonomy

Anna’s demand was simple — create an ombudsman like the Lokpal which is independent of the government. He had one more non-negotiable demand — the CBI should be autonomous but under the ambit of the Lokpal to prevent the abuse of power. There is no point in having a toothless Lokpal which cannot initiate an investigation or ensure a fair probe.

In the cases relating to K.M. Birla and the former Coal Secretary, P.C. Parakh, the main issue has been lost sight of. When the CBI took time to act or looked the other way, it was accused of doing its masters’ bidding. When it acted against Mr. Birla and Mr. Parakh at the court’s behest, many corporate chieftains were quick to proclaim Mr. Birla’s innocence saying he was a respected industrialist. Retired bureaucrats sprang to the defence of Mr. Parakh, demanding how someone like him could be accused of malfeasance. How could they even be investigated? The CBI is being taken to task for making someone else a scapegoat for crimes that may have been committed in the Prime Minister’s Office and, by extension, people who control the Prime Minister, letting the high and mighty off the hook. The hapless CBI finds itself between a rock and a hard place.

The way the CBI has functioned all these years under successive governments and is now being stonewalled and made to go around in circles by the Coal Ministry to access crucial documents, lends credence to the generally held belief and the Supreme Court’s observation that the agency is a “caged parrot,” and strengthens the public perception that investigating agencies, both at the Centre and the State level, are usually hand in glove with the ruling party. And the CBI itself has confirmed this in its latest affidavit to the Supreme Court.

So the moot point is not if it is fair and proper to question Mr. Birla, Mr. Parakh or even the Prime Minister. It is whether the CBI is truly independent. Can it be expected to act fairly, objectively and without fear or favour? Does it have the autonomy and the necessary powers and resources at its command to question the powerful, regardless of their formidable reputation, if preliminary investigation points to them? How do we enable the agency to perform its functions with speed and prudence? Which constitutionally empowered body can ensure its autonomy and yet hold it accountable so that it does not run amok?

An opportunity for revival

But all this, while relevant, has now been relegated to the background in the light of the Gauhati High Court judgment which has questioned the very existence and legitimacy of the CBI. This may be an opportune time to enact a new law and breathe fresh life into it under the Lokpal Bill, taking into account diverse views and all aspects of its functioning under successive governments which have clipped its wings. In all western democracies, investigative agencies have undergone huge and numerous makeovers and evolved over a period of time. So, we need not be alarmed and denigrate the CBI. We need to set it free.

The Lokpal with the CBI under it may not be a panacea for all our ills but as Anna Hazare has said, it is the first of many steps and battles to be fought in a people’s movement to usher in good governance.

Here is a wild thought. Can Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi repeat his performance — of dismissing the ordinance to supersede the Supreme Court verdict on convicted legislators as “complete nonsense” and getting it scrapped? Can he now make bold to support Anna Hazare in ushering in a strong Lokpal Bill with the CBI under its oversight? With that, he will upstage Mr. Narendra Modi, turn the tables on both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and his own party and its allies, and tilt to his side the aam aadmi, who seems to be drifting towards Arvind Kejriwal. It may be wishful thinking as only a few months are left for the general election. But if he succeeds, he will kill four birds with one stone.

India and climate talks imperatives

India needs an early agreement, and also adequate atmospheric “space” in terms of allowed carbon emissions to pursue its development goals. It needs to take a proactive stance on this

By all accounts, no dramatic developments are to be expected from the 19th edition of the Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that started in Warsaw last week. But it is generally acknowledged that the key issue at Warsaw, even if there are many other significant subjects on the agenda, centres around moving forward the negotiations on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (DPA) initiated at COP 17 two years ago.

It is widely understood that the Durban Platform was a game-changer, setting the stage for decisive climate action based on clear commitments to emissions reduction from all nations. Subsequently, the discussions in the Ad-Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform (ADP) have resulted in demanding timeline for achieving its aims, including a draft text to be produced by the COP in 2014, a global meeting of heads of states of all nations to be convened by the United Nations Secretary General to push forward such an agreement, and a final agreement to be reached by COP 21 in 2015.

While it is not a foregone conclusion that the DPA will achieve its stated goals by 2015, there are now additional factors conducive to reaching a global agreement. Even if no individual extreme climate event can be attributed exclusively to increased global warming, increasing awareness of the impact of climate-driven disasters, such as Typhoon Haiyan and the Uttarakhand flash floods, is contributing to a global recognition of the urgency of a climate deal, among governments as well as civil society. Significantly, the release of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the next several months, culminating in the release of the final synthesis report of all its findings next year, will add to the sense of urgency.

At the UNFCCC, the European Union has been the most active in pushing forward the agenda of the Durban Platform, laying out in increasing detail the framework and broad outlines of its content and a methodology for securing commitments that would ensure an effective treaty. It has been joined in this effort by many African nations, especially South Africa, and have the strong support of the island-states of the world — support that was vociferously expressed at Durban in 2011. The United States has pursued a two-track policy with respect to the DPA. On the one hand, the U.S. insists that it would undertake only such emissions reductions as it deems feasible, a strategy that is referred to as the “bottom up” approach in the global climate discourse. On the other hand, it has not hesitated to support the European Union, the Africa Group and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in their efforts to have a binding climate agreement with assigned commitments to all nations, especially when such commitments are to be imposed on China and India.

India’s interests

Where do India’s interests lie in the matter of a global climate agreement? There can be no doubt that India needs an early climate agreement, for two reasons. On the one hand, there is increasing evidence that unchecked global warming would lead to increasingly severe effects in several sectors, especially agriculture and water, apart from the increased frequency of extreme climate events. The enhanced climate variability that accompanies global warming will have serious impacts on Indian farmers, the bulk of whom are small-holders who even today suffer the consequences of weather and climate shocks, before the effects of global warming have risen to more alarming levels. An early climate agreement with the potential to restrict global average temperature rise to at least 2 degrees Centigrade, if not lower, is certainly a necessity. An early and effective limit on greenhouse gas emissions will also contribute to lowering the need, and associated costs, for climate change adaptation, which otherwise could be considerable.

At the same time, India needs adequate atmospheric “space” in terms of allowed carbon emissions to pursue its development. Even in a highly optimistic scenario in which renewable energy rapidly takes up the bulk of the requirements for sectors such as domestic lighting and heating, agriculture, and all energy needs of small-scale establishments, India will still need fossil fuels for a considerable time until reliable sources of clean energy become available for large-scale use in the expansion of industry, transportation and the like, all of which are needed for development. Even infrastructure needs for adaptation will require such emissions.

The IPCC’s AR5 report has brought to the centre-stage of discussion the notion of a global carbon budget, referring to the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, from the beginning of the industrial era till the end of the 21st century, that are permissible, if the global temperature rise is to be kept below 2 degrees C. For a 66 per cent probability of keeping the rise in global average temperature below this limit, the world is allowed approximately 1000 billion tonnes of carbon emissions (taking account solely of carbon dioxide). But the nub of the issue is the equitable distribution of this space. In per capita terms, or indeed by several other measures of equitable distribution as well, the developed countries have already substantially exceeded their fair share of this global budget. As a consequence, a large number of developing countries, including China but especially India, will have to make do with less than their fair share of the global carbon space as their national carbon budgets for the future, if indeed global warming has to be kept in check.

‘Top-down’ agreement

To maximise the developing countries’ access to the global carbon budget, an early “top-down” agreement to impose constraints on the developed nations’ consumption of carbon “space” in the atmosphere is an obvious necessity. Even more obviously, an approach based on “voluntary” commitments to emissions reduction by developed and developing countries would not address India’s needs.

In view of these considerations, it is surprising that New Delhi’s guidelines for its Warsaw delegation should set aside India’s long-standing commitment to treating the atmosphere as a global commons, to be shared equitably by all nations, and instead back the “voluntary commitments” approach. Predictably, even before this approach has been articulated, it has run into rough weather. The EU is of course fully aware of the global carbon budget and hence demands that the gap between the sum of all voluntary commitments and the allowed global budget has to made up by further emissions reductions that all nations have to agree to. This demand, as well as India’s response that the gap must be made up by the developed nations based on historical responsibility for emissions, brings us back to what is indeed a “top-down” approach.

At the heart of the Government of India’s current confusion lies its unwillingness to acknowledge that in an eventual global agreement, all countries have to shoulder some part of the burden, even while any such burden-sharing must be based on equity and climate justice in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. New Delhi’s view currently is that developing countries will have no binding commitments whatsoever even into the future, a view that will increasingly isolate India from even others in the ranks of the G-77. The inadequacy of official India’s unhappy approach is brought out by the fact that it has allowed the term “equity reference framework” in the context of the ADP negotiations to be hijacked by other nations, including nations of the African Group as well as the EU. India and its like-minded friends are left in the unenviable position of opposing this term, claiming that developing nations will never undertake any binding commitment.

For too long, India’s official climate policy has portrayed the absence of a proactive stance on a climate agreement as a strategy to protect the country’s interests. Climate science as well as good climate politics demand that India shift to making clear to the world its commitment, in concrete terms, both to securing its developmental future as well as preserving the global environment.

Challenge to artistic expression

The Madhya Pradesh High Court’s directive to change the title of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie Ram Leela, is only the latest setback to artistic and creative expression in India. The High Court’s order underlines the urgent need to reconsider the film certification process, and indeed, the archaic Cinematograph Act of 1952. Mr. Bhansali’s offering was cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification, a statutory body entrusted with vetting all aspects of a movie, including its title. If a High Court judge could overrule the CBFC in response to a petition that claimed the title Ram Leela offended religious sentiments, the Board’s mandate is in serious jeopardy. Presumably, neither the judge nor the petitioners had a chance to evaluate the movie ahead of its release. The Madhya Pradesh High Court could have simply issued notice to the movie’s producers while refusing to comment on the petition’s merits, as the Bombay High Court had done. The Delhi High Court had gone further, imposing a fine on an NGO that preferred a similar, vexatious complaint against the movie. The Madhya Pradesh High Court’s order has opened the door for mischievous attempts to curb free speech and rendered the movie vulnerable to attacks elsewhere.

Ram Leela may not have met the fate of movies like Vishwaroopam and Madras Café, banned altogether by the Tamil Nadu government. But in all three cases, film-makers were in no position to contest any violation of their freedoms. The exigency of ensuring a timely release in a competitive market has left them at the mercy of fringe elements who twist the law to meet their ends. Those aggrieved by the CBFC’s decision to clear the title Ram Leela could well have approached the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal. The rationale behind a dedicated certification process is laid to waste if producers are not offered an opportunity to present their case. Summary decisions by courts, as with that issued by the Madhya Pradesh High Court, often come at the cost of due process. The Justice Mukul Mudgal Committee, constituted to formulate a model Cinematograph Act, had recommended that the FCAT’s scope be enlarged so as to make it the primary venue for such litigation. The draft Bill mooted by the Committee suggests that movies be evaluated in the “context […] and people to which the film relates.” Whether Ram Leela slights the traditional enactment of the Ramayana or is merely a reference to the movie’s protagonists is best decided by the FCAT. Lawmakers must take up the Mudgal Committee's recommendations in earnest to avoid such scenarios as the one created by the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s order.

Commonwealth games

It was only as recently as December 2012 that the Commonwealth framed a Charter to bring together and reaffirm all that it stands for in a changing world. It contains an unequivocal recommitment to human rights, democracy, good governance, rule of law and freedom of expression among others as ‘the core values and principles’ of this group of nations. It is thus not extraordinary that CHOGM 2013 in Sri Lanka should have been upstaged almost entirely by allegations of grave human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan military against Tamil civilians in 2009 during the last battles against the LTTE. That the Colombo Declaration focussed on fostering sustainable, inclusive and equitable development in Commonwealth nations and kept away from all mention of human rights — the final communiqué too contained no adverse mention of Sri Lanka — can only be small consolation to the host. The Rajapaksa government had hoped that the summit would help in restoring its international credibility. Exactly the opposite has happened. There is a harsher spotlight on the country’s rights record, new allegations have been levelled even while old ones refuse to go away. Colombo’s troubles can only be partly blamed on the domestic politics in countries where this edition of CHOGM was vociferously opposed, prompting some heads of government to stay away, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. There would have been little space for such opposition if only Sri Lanka had moved quickly to implement the recommendations of its Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission.

This year’s CHOGM cruelly showed up New Delhi’s inadequacies in dealing with an important neighbour, hostage as Sri Lanka policy has become to the short-sighted vision of Tamil Nadu’s political parties. Manmohan Singh’s decision not to attend the summit has brought no political or diplomatic advantage. By comparison, British Prime Minister David Cameron showed far more nous. He silenced political opposition to his participation by using the occasion to publicly criticise Sri Lanka’s rights record, issuing an ultimatum to President Rajapaksa to institute by March a credible inquiry into allegations of rights violations. How useful such ultimatums are as a diplomatic strategy is questionable going by the Sri Lankan leader’s defiant stance, but the British Prime Minister achieved his stated aim of “focus[ing] the eyes of the world on Sri Lanka”. He also did what the Indian Prime Minister should have done — visited Jaffna, connecting with the Tamil people and their problems first-hand. New Delhi will face its next Sri Lanka test in March 2014 at the U.N. Human Rights Council, but its timing right before the elections means it may blunder through again.

SC notice to Centre on PIL against commuting death sentence

Former President Pratibha Patil’s decision to commute death sentence of five condemned prisoners in child rape cases on Monday came under judicial scrutiny with the Supreme Court issuing notice to the Centre on a plea seeking to set aside the commutation.

A bench headed by Chief Justice P. Sathasivam agreed to hear a PIL questioning the then President’s decision to commute death penalty in the cases of extreme brutality.

The petitioner Pinki Virani, a journalist, contended that out of 35 cases in which death sentence was commuted by Ms. Patil, five cases are pertaining to brutal child rape and submitted that the relief should not have been granted by the President in those cases.

Questioning the decision taken by the President, the petitioner submitted that these are shocking cases and death sentence should not have been revoked.

“We need to tell the government that this is not the way to exercise the power,” senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for the petitioner, submitted before the bench also comprising justices Ranjana P Desai and Ranjan Gogoi.

“We are not happy with the present state of affairs,” he submitted.

The bench after brief hearing agreed to adjudicate the matter and issued notices to the Centre and Ministry of Home Affairs.

Telangana: GoM completes process of talks with stakeholders

The GoM, set up to look into the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, has completed the process of discussions with various stake holders and will submit its report to the Union Cabinet as early as possible to pave way for tabling Telangana Bill in Winter Session of Parliament.

“We have completed the process of discussions with others. Now the GoM members will meet to discuss among themselves to finalise the report to be submitted to the Cabinet as soon as possible,” Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said on Monday.

After a series of meetings between the GoM and Union Ministers from Andhra Pradesh and Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, Mr. Shinde told reporters that the Telangana Bill will be tabled in the Winter Session of Parliament.

The Group of Ministers, headed by Mr. Shinde, will meet again on November 21 and is likely to send the report to the Union Cabinet for consideration by this month end.

Sources said following an instruction from Congress high command, the GoM has held a series of meetings with different stake holders, including eight political parties in the last ten days.

Meanwhile, Home Ministry officials have started compiling reports of different ministries which gave their opinion on distribution of assets and other issues between the new state and the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh.

Once the Cabinet clears the proposal, it will go to the President who in turn will refer it to Andhra Pradesh Assembly for approval. However, the Assembly resolution is not binding under the Constitution.

Government will then prepare Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill and with Union Cabinet’s approval, it will send it to the President before being tabled in Parliament.

The Winter Session of Parliament commences on December 5 and will conclude on December 20.

Developing countries call for easing IPR costs of clean technologies

The issue of easing the costs of intellectual property resources on clean technologies takes centre stage

For the developed countries it was a devil buried at the climate negotiations last year at Doha. At the Warsaw talks, the developing countries, including India, resuscitated the devil — easing the costs of intellectual property rights (IPR) on clean technologies — back to life, by demanding that a funding mechanism be set up to buy licenses on clean but costly technologies to provide to the poor countries.

The topic of intellectual property rights has been such a hot potato for the developed countries that at the climate talks last year, developing countries had to agree to back-burner it in order to build consensus.

Bringing the topic right back to the centre-stage again at Warsaw, the Egyptian lead negotiator, speaking for the Like Minded Developing Countries, said: “Like the Harry Potter series character, in Doha, IPR was the ‘word which should not be named’. But we live in the real world not in a fictional world. In this real world we live in, we need to address this issue of IPRs in a pragmatic manner, not run away from this issue.”

While the analogy elicited smiles and some laughter from all quarters, the real content of the proposalagain brought to the fore the deep divisions. The LMDC countries said: “To begin with, we can use the financial mechanisms under the Convention to fund the IPR costs to ensure that climate-friendly technology is available to developing countries easily. A dedicated window under the Green Climate Fund for technology transfer and IPR issues should be established.”

India’s negotiator in the room, T.S. Tirumurti, intervened to add: “‘The word that should not be named’ was one on which Parties have serious differences. There is need to be pragmatic and not run way from the issue. The delegate called for the ‘word’ to be named.”

Egypt, speaking for the LMDC — which includes Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Dominica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, India, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria and Venezuela — said the group wanted a chapter on technology development and transfer as an integral part of the 2015 outcome.

The EU delegation opposed the move a day later, claiming that it saw the protection of IPRs as essential to dissemination of technologies and not as a barrier.

A source in the LMDC group told The Hindu: “It is important for us to keep this issue on the table. It is going to generate a lot of heat and perhaps not get as much traction but it’s important to not let this fall off.”

As the U.N. climate negotiations require consensus and not majority for decisions to be taken, the chances of a mechanism to buy out IPRs remains low and progress on the issue is bound to be hampered. But the intervention by the group, of which India and China are important members, has ensured that it will not get knocked off the decisions taken in Warsaw drawing elements for the 2015 agreement.

Human intervention hindering tiger movement in country

Study finds that connectivity between protected areas is affected by urban expansion

Even as efforts are being made to protect, conserve, and augment the wild tiger population of the country, a study report that appeared in the open-access journal ‘Plos One’ earlier this month says that human intervention, even in the form of roads through tiger habitats, hinders the instinctive quality of the tiger to wander far in search of connectivity with distant populations.

The study ‘Connectivity of Tiger (Panthera tigris) Populations in the Human-Influenced Forest Mosaic of Central India’ conducted in six protected forest areas of Central India with appreciable tiger population shows that tigers can wander even 650 km between protected areas for connectivity.

The study was conducted by Aditya Joshi, Samrat Mondol, and Uma Ramakrishnan from the National Centre for Biological Sciences attached to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, Srinivas Vaidyanathan from the Foundation for Ecological Research, Puducherry, and Advait Edgaonkar from the Indian Institute of Forest Management.

The study was carried out in the protected areas of Melghat Tiger Reserve, Pench Tiger Reserve, Nagzira Wildlife Sanctuary, and Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra; Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh; and Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve in Andhra Pradesh.

The study says that many tigers currently live in small protected areas in India, and their survival depends on increasing the connectivity between these areas through tiger corridors.

Further, geo-spatial analyses revealed that tiger connectivity was affected by landscape elements such as human settlements, road density, and host-population tiger density, but not by distance between populations.

Landscape crucial

“Our results elucidate the importance of landscape and habitat viability outside and between protected areas and provide a quantitative approach to test functionality of tiger corridors. We suggest future management strategies aim to minimise urban expansion between protected areas to maximise tiger connectivity,” the authors said in their report.

“Achieving this goal in the context of ongoing urbanisation and need to sustain current economic growth exerts enormous pressure on the remaining tiger habitats and emerges as a big challenge to conserve wild tigers in the Indian subcontinent.”

Adult tigers live cramped in the country now within less that 7 per cent of their historical range.

The authors based their studies on genetic approaches combined with landscape ecology to study tiger dispersals between the six protected areas chosen for the study.

The study focussed on whether there was connectivity between tiger populations in Central India over long distances and which geographical features hindered this connectivity.

By sampling tiger scat for DNA, the authors found evidence of long-range tiger dispersal over 650 km between protected areas, which is much farther than previously found.

Issue of loss and damage: G77+China issue ultimatum to developed countries

The G77+China group delivered an ultimatum to the developed countries on the issue of Loss and Damage, threatening to walk out of the Warsaw negotiations if the developed countries did not stop blocking it. The ultimatum was delivered by the G77+China negotiator Juan Hoffmeister, who is leading the talks on the issue for the developing country block, at a closed door meeting on Saturday evening, raising the stakes higher for all just before the ministerial round of negotiations begin this week in the Polish capital.

Very rarely has any country block issued such an ultimatum at the climate talks in recent while and it is taken with extreme seriousness at such high profile events.

Countries such as Australia and Canada, which form part of the Umbrella group with the US and Japan have demanded that the climate negotiations even discuss the issue while the US itself has demanded that it the subject, which has the G77+China united in a rare show of solidarity, be subjugated as just another stream of conversation under the existing Adaptation track of the talks.

Loss and Damage refers to the demand of the developing countries, especially the small and most vulnerable ones, to be provided compensation for the losses they suffer due to existing emission levels and that any future emission reduction effort or adaptation to global warming cannot help.

The G77+China group has put forth a collective proposal on the negotiating table to set up a separate new mechanism under the UN climate talks that would to carry out this task but the US has blocked it demanding that at best it be an extremely weak arrangement that continues to just study the issue under the adaptation track where ‘compensation’ is not used as an operative term.

The talks on the issue floundered all week, leading the G77+C

Developing world’s firm ‘no’ to market-based mechanism

hina coordinator Hoffmeister to up the stakes for the developed countries by warning that the developing countries would not agree to the Warsaw meeting delivering on other fronts in return for stepping down on this demand.

Rumours had swelled within the G77+China group over the weekend that the developed countries’ ministers may bring a finance package – the other key demand from the developing countries at Warsaw – and expect the former to back down on the demand for Loss and Damage mechanism. The threat of a walk out conveyed to the US and others that this could not be the case.

Hoffmeister when contacted by The Hindu refused to comment on his statement in the contact group on Satuday.

Another G77+China negotiator who deals closely with the Loss and Damage issue, wishing to remain anonymous, said, “This has to be a deliverable at Warsaw. There are no two ways about it. We had to convey that.” When asked if the G77+China group would come true on its ultimatum if the developed countries continued to block the mechanism, he said, “These things are not said lightly, but we are sure our partners will see this as a legitimate demand of the vulnerable counties and take the negotiations on it seriously.”

Sources from at least three key countries in the G77+China block confirmed that in bilateral meetings and informal discussions between various countries on both side of the divide, the importance of a decision on the issue had been repeatedly asserted.

The US special envoy on climate change, Todd Stern arrived in Warsaw on Sunday and developing countries are expected to read every word he has to say on the controversial subject to find not just whether the US would budge but how far it would go to convince its other key partners – Australia and Canada that have taken the most trenchant position against the subject being discussed.

Underwhelming proposed decisions for future disappoints developing countries

No implementation of existing decisions in the proposal

An underwhelming draft negotiating text on how countries would enhance climate change actions in near and longer-term future, including under the 2015 agreement, left the developing countries disappointed on Monday morning.

An Indian negotiator said, “We are looking for implementation of previous decisions and enhancement of actions on finance, adaptation and mitigation but the draft text does not provide that. It is disappointing. We shall have to raise this issue.”

The text referred to as the draft agreement on the Ad-hoc Working Group on Durban Platform (ADP) was supposed to reflect how countries would increase commitments in the short run on reducing emissions, adapting to climate change and providing finance between now and 2020. It is also supposed to lay out the basic elements of what would form part of the new climate 2015 agreement.

Several developing country negotiators that The Hindu spoke to, including from the Africa Group, Like-Minded Developing Countries and Least Developed Countries, said the document only suggested we continue to talk next year too about decisions that should have been implemented now or against which a time-line should have been drawn here at Warsaw.

At the time of filing of the report several groups were huddled behind closed doors assessing the text, which had been drawn out by the elected chairs of the ADP stream of negotiations over the weekend.

On the trenchant issue of Loss and Damage, the Presidency and hosts of the meeting, Poland set up two ministers from South Africa and Denmark to anchor the discussions further as the ministerial level talks kick-start.

The countries are now slated to discuss the draft text on ADP in the post lunch session and sources in the G77 block said that it promised to be a long and diplomatically tough round.

xaam.in

Relevant News / Current Affair for UPSC CIvil Service Exam 18-11-2013