CLIMATE CHANGE AND EQUITY: India - Class injustice

Sub-national divisions between rich and poor in India are identified as being divisive both economically and environmentally. This excellent article from Frontline illustrates why decisions taken at an international level need to be coupled with responsible national practices in order to genuinely ensure that climate change is purse-neutral and that we all bear its costs and reap its benefits.

Source: Frontline - India's national magazine ... "class injustice" by R. RAMACHANDRAN

Rich Indians are eating into the carbon space the poor need for economic growth, and recent national policies have helped such disparities grow.
PARTH SANYAL A THERMAL POWER station in West Bengal. India is ranked as the 14th worst carbon intense electricity-producing nation in the world.
IT is a truism and so does not require detailed surveys to drive home its point: in India the disparities in living standards and consumption patterns, in particular of energy, between the rich and the poor are so vast that in the context of climate change, by emitting disproportionately large amounts of carbon, the former class is eating into the carbon space that the latter genuinely needs for its economic growth and development. By focussing exclusively on economic growth in the gross without adequately addressing issues of equity, national policies of the recent past have increased these disparities, which will only render the already vulnerable sections of India even more incapable of adapting to the dangerous effects of climate change.Greenpeace report
“Hiding Behind the Poor”, a recent report by Greenpeace India, provides a quantitative perspective to this internal “climate injustice”. Even such a quantitative perspective is not new. In 1997, N.S. Murthy and associates from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, highlighted the high degree of distortion in energy consumption prevalent in the country. Using 1989-90 data, they showed that the richest top 10 per cent of urban people emitted 12 times as much carbon a person a year as the bottom poor. They showed that the extreme disparity ratio (EDR), defined as the ratio of the energy (direct and indirect) consumed by the urban top and the rural bottom, was 10.3 for coal, 14.8 for oil and 9.0 for electricity and 12 in terms of the total carbon equivalent. The Greenpeace report only serves as a reminder – if one was required – that it is high time the government put in place appropriate policy measures to reverse this trend, which has been allowed to continue unbridled.
International negotiations on climate change have been premised on the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” to address the issue of the iniquitous development of nations and their highly disparate per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Since, historically, developed countries have been the biggest emitters of GHGs (in particular, of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) and hence are responsible for global warming and the consequent climate change, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, framed under the convention, require that industrialised countries (called Annex-1 countries under the protocol) cut back on their GHG emissions (to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012).
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