COP27: India Expresses Concerns Over Developed Nations’ Attempt to Augment Mitigation to Agriculture

According to sources, in the UN climate summit currently taking place in Egypt, India has argued that wealthy nations do not want to reduce emissions by changing their lifestyles and are instead "searching for cheaper solutions abroad" while opposing the efforts by the developed world to broaden the scope of mitigation to agriculture.

"The developed nations want to use diversionary tactics to lessen their obligations resulting from historical emissions at every climate summit in order to move the goalposts of the global climate regime. The world owes Annex-I nations a carbon debt of 790 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2), or USD 79 trillion, even at the low price of USD 100 per tonne," India said at the summit.

The developed nations continue to highlight the need to reduce agriculture emissions, which are considered "survival emissions" rather than "luxury emissions," in order to divert attention away from their excessive GHG emissions, it added.

India made it clear that the developed world's excessive historical cumulative emissions are the reason why the world is currently experiencing a climate crisis.

They were described as being "unable to make any meaningful changes in their way of life to reduce their domestic emissions. Instead, they are looking for less expensive options abroad ".

Small and marginal farmers work long hours and bear the whims of extreme weather and climate variability, as well as the added stress of climate change, to practice agriculture in the majority of developing nations worldwide. The world's agriculture, lands, and seascapes are intended to serve as a site of mitigation for the developed countries' wasteful, excessive emissions, India said as quoted by the news reports.

Stressing the current challenges faced by the world, India claimed that industrialized nations have not put any new financial offerings on the table and that their excessive emissions are being managed by using agriculture as a site of mitigation through the existing interim running bodies like the Global Environment Facility and Green Climate Fund.

"Agriculture will be most severely impacted by climate change, as is generally known to the world and understood even in layman's terms, and is therefore primarily a site for adaptation", it added.

Talking about its domestic contribution to the annual emission, India said, "Even now, India's annual per capita emissions are only approximately one-third of the world average. The greatest available science indicates that there would be no climate disaster if global emissions were to be equal to those of India per capita. India is one of those nations that are extremely vulnerable to climate change. India repeatedly argues that the primary site of adaptation in poor countries is agriculture".