BASIC countries wont let Copenhagen push Kyoto away

Rejecting attempts to make the Copenhagen Accord the new international legal framework on climate change,India and the three other major developing countries that constitute the BASIC group....

Rejecting attempts to make the Copenhagen Accord the new international legal framework on climate change,India and the three other major developing countries that constitute the BASIC group,on Sunday reaffirmed their commitment in the existing global arrangement that has the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC at its centre.

The ministers of India,China,South Africa and Brazil met here in the backdrop of developments that these countries saw as the latest attempts by some rich nations to formalise the Copenhagen Accord a political agreement that came out at the end of the climate change conference in the Danish capital last month into an international treaty,sidelining the Kyoto Protocol.

Many rich countries are extremely uncomfortable with the deep emission cuts demanded from them by the Kyoto Protocol and want to replace it with something less restrictive. The Copenhagen Accord,essentially the result of an agreement between BASIC countries and the US,is a nascent document and these countries hope to mould it into a legal framework that is more to their liking.

For the BASIC countries,and indeed the rest of the world,the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC process are sacrosanct for precisely the same reason why the rich countries hate these.

The BASIC countries played a crucial role in finalising the Copenhagen Accord. We support it but we are of the view that the value of the Accord lies not as a standalone document but as an input into the two-track negotiating process being followed till now, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said.

The two-track process refers to the parallel negotiations going on for finalising the long-term global strategy to deal with climate change and also for fixing the new targets for greenhouse gas emission cuts by the rich countries for a period beyond 2012 when their current emission cut commitments come to an end.

A joint statement at the end of the BASIC meeting demanded that negotiations should begin immediately on both these tracks and that the negotiating groups meet at least six times this year in order to conclude the final agreement at the next climate change conference in Mexico in December. The four countries also said that they would adhere to the January 31 deadline to communicate their voluntary actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the UNFCCC.

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The members of the BASIC group have already announced a series of voluntary mitigation actions for 2020. The ministers expressed their intention to communicate information on their voluntary mitigation actions to the UNFCCC by January 31,2010, the statement said. Sources said the voluntary actions from India would include the 20-25 per cent reduction in emission intensity by 2020 announced by New Delhi in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference.

In another significant move,the four countries considered the option of setting up a fund to help the poorer nations to adapt to climate change. We discussed whether we can collectively do something in this regard. No conclusion was reached. We would hopefully come up with something concrete in our next meeting in April in Cape Town, Ramesh said,while demanding that the rich countries keep their promise of providing 10 billion to the most vulnerable countries this year.