‘A lot in common between India, Brazil in dealing with climate crisis’

Brazilian President Lula da Silva is in India to attend the India AI summit. How do you think AI can be beneficial in combating climate change issues?

Finance, technology and capacity building are cross-cutting enablers that help different solutions scale faster. During COP30 last year, one of the plans that came out of the action agenda was a collection of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Digital Public Goods (DPG) that can help climate that work across all sectors. There are these tools for energy, industry, agriculture, and forests — which can be catalysts to scale solutions exponentially. We are jointly working on this and I think we will see a bilateral announcement on this soon.

To scale AI and digital infrastructure, huge investments are being made in formulation of data centres, which require large quantities of water and energy, posing a threat to the ongoing sustainability dialogue. What is your comment on this as the COP presidency?

Development and sustainability need to work hand in hand. You need solutions that will not only help us decrease the need for water and reduce the need for energy to run these data centres, but also how we source the energy from renewable sources to the data centres. Alongside problems, we also need to focus on solutions. At present, there are several stakeholders and companies working towards bringing a solution to this problem. We will have to monitor how fast these private stakeholders adapt to these technologies and how we can scale them further. We need to find out regulatory and financial instruments that may help us achieve those solutions, because this is not about stopping progress in terms of technology, but about finding solutions to make these things compatible over time. I think we do see a number of such gatherings taking place in the future.

During COP 30 last year, Lula said we have to prepare for a world without fossil fuels. Developed nations including the European Union (EU) have backed phasing out fossil fuels while developing nations like India maintained a different stand. As a developing nation, member of the BRICS, what is Brazil’s standpoint on this?

President Lula was talking about the need for us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and to plan our way. There is a consensus agreement coming from the global stocktake and the Paris Agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. We’re seeing the trends on demand for oil and gas and that cannot happen in an unplanned way. I think the point that Lula and Brazil have been making is that planning is better than not planning. Right after COP, our president announced that Brazil will create a roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuel. There is a national conversation about this and a plan is being put on the table to be discussed with different actors at the national level.

At present, several nations are witnessing inter-country military conflicts. In such a tense geopolitical scenario, what are the challenges you face as a presidency in terms of holding and monitoring climate talks with countries involved and affected by these conflicts?

All nations have made their decision to decisively move into the implementation phase of the agreement with full consensus. Implementing the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) stands at the national level. If you want to, you will be able to. If you want to join forces with other countries that have the same challenges you do and want to work on the same solutions, you can do that upon full consensus. I think in this complicated, geopolitical environment, we can work at internally implementing the actions in addition to keeping the basis for the consensus when it comes to implementation of cross border actions.

How are you seeing the action agendas that were finalised in COP30 being taken ahead in the global south here at the MCW?

In the COP30 negotiations that concluded in November last year, we had some important results focusing on voluntary action jointly through coalitions in areas of energy, transport, industry, forest, oceans, biodiversity, cities, water, infrastructure and human and social development. The framework has been created over the last 10 years and all actors involved in this are now actively working to reach these objectives. Some of these coalitions we see here in Mumbai, and they exist and are booming. We are in the middle of the agenda implementation phase and we need to see how we can continue these conversation year-round and not just for two weeks at COP.

It’s been three months since negotiations at COP30 concluded, how are nations working towards implementing all the action agendas, and, being the presidency, how are you monitoring it?

There are a few mandates that came out of COP. We are in the implementation phase and there are several aspects to the conversation. First, the action agenda is a space which is not only limited to nations or their governments involved. This is a much broader conversation involving private sectors, investors, and so on. All of the initiatives that were launched during COP30 or that were taken up in the last 10 years since the Paris Agreement was formulated continue to stay. That’s exactly what we have seen here as well in Mumbai. There’s also another mission of bringing down the average global temperature by 1.5 degrees and our objective is to continue political conversation around this. Many of the countries that have already presented their NDCs are talking about the implementation of those. For that you need financial instruments, you need de-risking tools, which discussions here have covered. Multi-level conversations are already underway with all stakeholders involved in terms of implementation of every level of action agenda.