Climate Change Dialogue: Need a Variety of Approaches & Diverse, Context-based Solutions to Address Equity Issues, says Jairam Ramesh

In his keynote address at the recently concuded 13th biennial IASC International Conference in Hyderabad, Shri Jairam Ramesh, India's Minister of Environment and Forests, addressed a wide range of commons related issues - from the global (climate change) to regional (use of waters, management of rivers and aquifers) and the local (management of forests).

In the first post of the series, we look at what the Minister had to say on the global commons.

Talking about climate change, Shri Ramesh said that the lack of communication between negotiators and academics was something he found very frustrating. According to him,

All the interesting work on climate change is taking place in the academic world and the negotiators in their world of round brackets, square brackets, footnotes and distinctions, such fine distinctions of shall and will and could and should are completely oblivious to the work of Jeffrey Frankel at Harvard, Micheal Spence of Stanford, Shelling or Prof.Ostrom herself. I think this has been a great tragedy and one of things I have been involved in is to try and get the negotiating community to look at this whole academic literature that now exists in the climate change area because central to a successful negotiation is how do we address the issue of equity.

Touching upon the Cancun agreement, Shri Ramesh spoke about the need for an alternate way to define equitable access. He said that the traditional framework of equitable access to carbon space tended to conjure up a right to pollute but the issue was actually one of ensuring a decent quality of life and standard of living to the country's population. Hence the new emerging concept at Cancun was that of equitable access to sustainable development. However, instead of seeking that one  holy grail of a formula or framework that would ensure equitable access to sustainable development, (which  he felt would inevitably create a stalemate as it would be near impossible for 193 countries to agree), Shri Ramesh stated that the way forward was perhaps in devising a set of formulae, a  diverse variety of approaches and context-based solutions.

Talking about the need for an operational definition of sustainable development, and the need to focus not only on equality of access on an international scale but on domestic issues as well, Shri Ramesh stated:

First of all we have to define what sustainable development is and we owe the definition of sustainable development to Mr.Nitin Desai, who defined in the 5th planning commission 22 years ago as the ability of a generation to meet its consumption needs without endangering the ability of a future generation. That was the kind of definition for sustainable development, but now we have to give it operational meaning and work out a framework that ensures equitable access which looks at population, per capita income, and which also looks at internal issues of distribution because in a country like India which is rightly concerned about the equality of access on the international scale cannot be oblivious to differences of access internally. This is now a big issue that we as a country have to come to grip with. We are world leaders when it comes to talking about international inequality but somehow we feel shy of dealing with domestic inequality. The domestic inequality in access to sustainable development today is a very serious issue that policy makers and academics have to come to terms with.

He summed up his thoughts on the global commons as follows:

So, on the global commons issue, all I would say now, what Cancun did was to (revive) the multilateral process which had reached a dead-end in Copenhagen, and brought about a certain degree of consensus on some of the issues that were (eluding) the negotiators and one of the biggest issues is how do you define a global goal and how do you define equity in the achievement of this goal, but, without necessarily endangering the growth prospects of developing countries.