Sensing the progressive mood of climate-concerned investors and environmentally conscious consumers, large companies have verbally fallen in line with the COP21’s agenda. The host country to COP21, France, has asserted that it is “obvious that a deal would be binding” and that China has also consented to a monitoring system to inspect how sincerely individual signatories to the Paris deal would implement their vows to cut carbon. But the litmus test lies in what happens to complex carbon pricing and cap-and-trade schemes within each country and region, and how transparently corporate malfeasance and backsliding will be exposed and corrected. With climate sceptics marginalised in the debate, Paris is on a strong wicket when it comes to common will and shared urgency for something to be done to arrest the worsening climate. The second factor working in favour of a final agreement in Paris is that the world’s two largest polluters, the United States of America and China, are jointly convinced that “climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity and that their two countries have a critical role to play in addressing it. If COP21 is to be a milestone rather than a “greenwash”, as radical ecologists allege, the onus is on vigilant grassroots actors who should keep challenging recalcitrant industries and retrograde government policies, and furthering small innovations that reduce human abuse of nature. The writer is a professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs.This is not the perfectly ambitious or robust approach that green civil society campaigners desire, but at least having an incremental deal on the table in Paris is better than coming home empty-handed with no lighthouse to guide and direct us in the decades to come.” Buffeted by natural calamities and rising pressure from their societies to act, both Washington and Beijing have announced time-bound carbon emission decreases and are pushing for a deal in Paris. Firstly, international opinion has tilted ever more overwhelmingly towards accepting scientific consensus that anthropogenic activity is the main cause for climatic disturbances and that we can ill-afford delaying the response to this challenge.
The 2015 Paris Climate Conference from November 30 to December 11 is a landmark in the history of environmental multilateralism that can lay a stepping stone for collective efforts to save planet eart The 2015 Paris Climate Conference from November 30 to December 11 is a landmark in the history of environmental multilateralism that can lay a stepping stone for collective efforts to save planet earth. Building upon the modest start of this diplomatic spectacle, we need round-the-clock social movements of citizens to raise the environmental banner, set progressively higher benchmarks and ratchet up national commitments. They are aspirational and nations which do not meet them are unlikely to face serious sanctions. As part of negotiations, leading players of G-77 like India have proposed they can execute deeper and faster cuts to carbon emissions if industrialised nations live up to their monetary pledges and offer “finance and technology free of intellectual property rights cost. The good news is that, thanks to major tectonic shifts, Paris will be more successful than the previous high-profile climate summit at Copenhagen in 2009.”Be it financing or complying with decarbonisation, nothing worthwhile can emerge from Paris unless giant carbon-discharging private corporations work in tandem with governments to walk the talk. From a political feasibility perspective, as national sovereignty is still a prized commodity, it is wisest to let Paris set up a model where the task of measuring, monitoring and reporting is left to each country’s government with technical assistance from international bodies that are discreet, just as member states of the UN periodically review their human rights records and present their compliance reports to the world body. With nearly 150 heads of government and state participating, it is a gigantic diplomatic endeavour to mitigate and manage climatic disaster as average temperatures surge and extreme weather patterns get deadlier and more frequent. The six-year-long buildup to the 21st session of the Conference of Parties (COP21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been exhausting.
