Britannia Radio

Asia hits back on climate change

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing and Amy Kazmin in New Delhi

Published: August 24 2009 16:38 | Last updated: August 24 2009 16:38

China and India have closed ranks on climate change, blaming developed countries for the lack of progress towards a deal.

“They have talked much, but not done much,” said Xie Zhenhua, China’s minister in charge of climate change, adding that the conflict between developed and developing nations was driven by commercial and political interest.

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His remarks came during two days of talks with Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, which were aimed at synchronising the two countries’ positions as negotiations at Copenhagen, Denmark, on climate change draw near.

Mr Ramesh also rejected the notion that the two Asian giants were obstructing a deal.

“The way the narrative seems to have evolved is that countries like India and China are holding back an inter national agreement,” he told foreign journalists before leaving for China. “Far from it.”

The two countries are responding to intensifying criticism from western ­governments and climate change activists for refusing to agree to binding targets for carbon emissions as part of efforts to forge an international deal to combat global warming. But the negotiators’ remarks also reflect their growing disillusionment with the talks.

“Developed countries just keep repeating the demand that China should commit to capping its emissions but they are not engaging in a sincere dialogue about the proposal China has put forward,” said Zou Ji, a leading climate change scholar at People’s University, Beijing, who has advised the government on its climate change policy and is head of the World Resources Institute in China.

This week the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament, is expected to adopt a resolution on climate change, a move observers believe could give the clearest indication yet of Beijing’s final negotiating position for Copenhagen.

China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has recently indicated that it could be open to discussing a cap on its emissions, but has combined this new flexibility with an insistence that it will still take decades for its emissions to peak – a stance that many western climate change experts see as in sincere.

No drafts of the resolution have been made public yet. “The best case would be something that would turn out to be China’s version of a climate change bill. The worst would be just more empty words aimed at demonstrating that they’re not to blame if there’s no deal,” said a diplomat working on climate change.

India is also on a mission to improve its reputation in the talks. “India is not defensive; India is not obstructionist; India is not a naysayer,” Mr Ramesh said. “We want a meaningful agreement, not like Kyoto 1, where countries took on obligations and, for some reason, didn’t fulfil them.”

Mr Ramesh, who will travel to Washington, Sweden and Norway in the coming weeks to discuss India’s position with counterparts there, says the depiction of Asia’s emerging economic giants as a potential stumbling block to a global deal is “unfair”.

Both China and India demand that developed nations, whose industrialisation they claim caused global warming, must help developing nations with the money and technology to fight it.