India: the global mediator in Copenhagen

India emerged as the global mediator during the recent UN summit on climate change in the Danish capital, working as the link between the developed and the developing world and being part of the Group of 5 countries that rescued the summit from abject failure.

For many years, India has been known as a champion of the developing world, a leader in the Group of 77 countries that, together with China, carry out climate negotiations as a bloc. G77, which actually has 135 member nations, is a loose grouping in many ways, but in the fight against climate change, \”we are 85 to 90 percent together\”, as India\’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh put it during the Copenhagen summit.

Via the G77, India has long been making the two basic points that developing countries have in the climate debate. One, that industrialised countries are responsible for almost all the global warming since the start of the Industrial Age that is now wreaking havoc throughout the world. And two, the rich countries owe the poor for this, and should pay what the poor nations need to cope with climate change effects.

While accepting the essential truth of these arguments, the rich countries have been saying their reduction of greenhouse gas emissions — that are warming the world — will have little effect in the long run unless large developing countries like China and India control their emissions. In absolute terms, China has been the world\’s top emitter since 2007, while India is fifth, though in per capita terms, India\’s emissions are only five percent of those by the United States and less than ten percent of those by the European Union.

In the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, it became clear that BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China - had to have a strategy to counter this argument. That was why all four of them announced ambitious plans to reduce their emissions intensity — the level of emissions per unit of GDP — in the weeks before the Dec 7-18 summit.

At a meeting in Beijing Nov 27-28, the four countries decided they would coordinate closely during the summit. Significantly, at this meeting they invited Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese envoy to the UN, so that he knew the plan and was assured that the BASIC countries were not going to go against the interests of the wider developing world in any way. Sudan is the current G77 chair.

Once in Copenhagen, Indian officials ensured that this twin coordination exercise went smoothly, attending the G77 meetings twice a day, the BASIC meetings once a day and on top of that, meeting Chinese officials every two hours to ensure that there would be no surprises in any of the negotiating rooms.

In the face of a strong push by European countries to bury the Kyoto Protocol — the current global treaty under which rich nations have to cut their emissions — and to replace it with a new one, India led the entire developing world in ensuring that the protocol would not die an untimely death during the summit.

But developed countries were adamant that they would not make their emissions reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, and the negotiations got bogged down in technical and procedural details. Despite the anguished pleas of small islands like the Maldives or Tuvalu that they were drowning as global warming raised the sea level and that the world must act here and now; despite a strong push by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to sort out the financing issue, when she promised her country would mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with climate change effects, it became increasingly clear that unless something dramatic happened, the much-awaited Copenhagen climate summit would end without even a whimper.

That dramatic game-changing moment came on the last evening of the summit, when US President Barack Obama joined uninvited a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and South African President Jacob Zuma.

It was at this meeting that the outline of the Copenhagen Accord was chalked out. The BASIC countries ensured that industrialised nations would declare their commitments to reduce emissions by the end of January. Then Obama said some European countries did not want the Kyoto Protocol to continue. According to Ramesh, Manmohan Singh made it very clear there could be no question of burying the protocol and got Obama to agree.

That still left a big sticking point. The rich countries had been insisting on international scrutiny of greenhouse gas control actions by large developing countries, something these countries had been resisting stoutly on grounds of sovereignty. Finally, the compromise suggested by India was approved — there would be international consultations and analysis, only on the actions supported by developed countries, as long as this did not affect sovereignty in any way.

If the Copenhagen Accord had gone to the main plenary session of the summit in this form, it would have been much stronger than what eventually emerged. But in accordance with UN rules of consensus, the draft was first shown to a bigger group of 25 countries plus the European Union. All country groupings from small island states to the group of African nations to the G77 to OPEC and the Umbrella group (Canada, US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) were represented, apart from the BASIC group.

There are conflicting reports of what happened at this meeting, with some participants blaming China for watering down the accord, while others blamed OPEC and the Umbrella group. But the fact that an accord did emerge showed the influence India now has on the world stage.

Foreign policy analyst C. Raja Mohan wrote in the Indian Express the week after: \”As India\’s economy grows faster than all others barring China\’s, Delhi\’s weight in the international system will inevitably rise…the aggregate size of their economies gives them unprecedented international clout.

\”Beijing and Delhi are destined to become global \’rule maker and rule enforcers\’ rather than the \’rule takers\’ they have been in the last couple of