‘Climate politics began with equity and justice — we now face evasion, migration and wars’
Sunita Narain is director general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke, she discusses the long ark of climate politics: What are some key turning points in the global trajectory of climate politics? ■ This discussion began in 1991. Global warming came onto the world stage as an issue when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was being negotiated. Right at the start, there was concern about what this meant in terms of development for the Global South. The first big flashpoint came when a report was published just before the 1992 Rio Conference when the Framework Convention was being negotiated. Until then, there was a lot of disquiet in developing nations about global warming but things were still simmering — suddenly, this report basically stated the developing world was a cause of climate change. It showed data about rising methane emissions and said if you took the contribution of the developing world, it matched that of countries like the United States. Therefore, it suggested, everyone had to act. Anil Agarwal and I then worked on a report titled ‘Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism’. The real sleight of hand the earlier report had done was to allocate a share of the global commons based on the contribution of emissions. Human beings emit because of fossil fuel-driven growth but nature has its own assimilative capacity to clean up through carbon sinks like the oceans. That report was saying that if the United States emits, say, 10x, then it also gets a 10x share of global sinks. We argued this was completely wrong and global sinks had to be allocated on the basis of principles. We found reallocating these on the basis of per capita changed the entire calculation.
