New Delhi:
The United Nations on Thursday published a first draft of the climate agreement, which makes no mention of a phase-out of all fossil fuels, a proposal introduced by India and supported by the European Union and many other countries.
The draft encourages “continued efforts to accelerate measures to phase out unabated coal-fired power plants and to phase out and rationalize inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, in line with national circumstances and recognizing the need for support for just transitions “.
Almost the same language was used in the Glasgow Climate Pact last year.
When contacted, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Environment said Indian negotiators would not comment “while negotiations are ongoing”.
The cover text also does not state when a damage financing facility will start and what its contours are.
Poor and developing countries have demanded that COP27 conclude with a decision to establish a fund to deal with loss and damage – a term used for irreversible destruction caused by climate change-induced disasters.
The text “emphasizes the importance of all efforts at all levels to achieve the temperature target of the Paris Agreement to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to continue efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”.
The 20-page document, described as a “non-paper” by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is 8,400 words long compared to the Glasgow Pact, which was about 4,600 words and in itself one of the longest cover texts in the history of UN climate summits.
India had proposed on Saturday to conclude talks with a decision to “phase out” all fossil fuels, not just coal.
EU Vice-President Frans Timmermans told media on Tuesday that the bloc would support India’s proposal “if it comes on top of what we already agreed in Glasgow”.
Citing the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Indian negotiators had told Egypt’s COP27 presidency that achieving the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement “requires a phase-out of all fossil fuels”.
“Selectively picking sources of emissions, either to label them as more harmful, or to label them as ‘green and sustainable’, even if they are sources of greenhouse gases, has no basis in the best available science,” they said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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