India Voices Concern Over Climate Finance at CoP29 Baku Talks

 New Delhi: India on Sunday expressed serious concern about the progress by the developed countries to engage in a climate finance and mitigation work programme at CoP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. However, India asserted that those with the highest capacity to take climate action have continuously shifted goalposts, delayed climate action, and consumed a highly disproportionate share of the global carbon budget.

“We have seen 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,” a government statement said after India delivered it in the closing plenary of the subsidiary bodies on the ‘Agenda on Sharm el-Sheikh Mitigation Ambition and Implementation Work Programme (MWP)’ on Saturday.

India has been continuously vocal about climate finance arrangements, primarily from the developed countries that are huge carbon emitters. India has asked developed countries to commit to provide and mobilise at least Rs 1.3 trillion every year till 2030 through grants, concessional finance and non-debt-inducing support, without subjecting developing nations to ‘growth-inhibiting conditionalities in the provision of finance’. It also emphasised that the support must cater to the ‘evolving needs and priorities of developing countries’.

Expressing frustration on the unwillingness to engage on this issue the statement read, “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?”

“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 Stock take in the Paris Agreement, where it informs the parties for undertaking climate actions,” the statement said.

India, however, stressed that the MWP was established with specific mandate that it shall be operationalised through focused exchanges of views, information and ideas, noting that the outcomes of the work programme will be non-prescriptive, non-punitive, facilitative, respectful of national sovereignty and national circumstances, while taking into account the nationally determined nature of nationally determined contributions and will not impose new targets or goal.

“We now have to meet our developmental needs in a situation of increasingly depleting carbon budgets 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,” the lead negotiator further stated in the statement.