AlwaysFree: India Abandoned Key Climate Meeting

The world’s third-biggest emitter, India, has just abandoned a key climate meeting, driving the global efforts to tackle climate change into a setback.

India was the only one of 51 invited countries that did not attend a two-day ministerial meeting in London. The meeting was hosted by the incoming president of the COP26 United Nations talks, set to lay the groundwork for a successful COP26 meeting, which would be the last chance to ensure global temperature increases do not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Previously last week, a Group of 20 (G20) meeting failed to set a more ambitious agreement on climate, and India was a key holdout.

The Indian government had decided against attending in person as the country had already made its views known at the G-20 meeting, then technical issues prevented it from taking part virtually, said a spokesman for India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.

India has been resisting the efforts to put pressure on emerging economies such as China and India to apply the net-zero emissions target by 2050.

The issues with achieving the target lay on concrete actions and a firm timeline to phasing out fossil fuels and subsidies, as well as commitments to ditch coal. 

India has been criticizing the net-zero pledge and urged G-20 nations to make a pledge that focused on per-capita emissions. It argues that as the second-most-populous emitter, emissions per head are extremely low, ranking 134.

“Keeping in view the legitimate need of developing countries in growth, we urge G-20 countries to commit to bringing down per-capita emissions to global average by 2030,” India said in a statement attached to the final G20 document.

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