Developing country policy-makers should take close note of a not-so-subtle shift in US policy regarding climate change, understand its dire implications, and prepare to respond.
Last month, US President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and half their cabinet met at the White House to discuss the US negotiating position for the climate change negotiations in Japan in December. The meeting could possibly not have had a higher profile, and besides the high administration officials included the leading lights of the US academia, corporations and labour movement. The meeting was significant for developing countries because it seemed to spell a new direction in US policy that might hurt them. The message was: for the industrialised world (the North) to be able to do anything on climate change, the South would also have to do its "share". Although the exact magnitude of this share was never laid out, it was obvious that the US will look unfavourably at any treaty that does not slap binding emission restrictions for the developing countries. What this means is the unraveling of the finely crafted principle of "shared but differentiated responsibility" in international environmental policy.
If this turns out to be so, it would mean that developing countries would be asked to make ´similar´, if not the same, percentage emission cuts. This, despite the fact that the historical and current responsibility for carbon emissions lies squarely with the North (80 percent of the emissions come from the 20 percent of the world population living in the North). Moreover, this will contradict the so-called "Berlin Mandate" of 1995 (which the US signed) that promises that the South will not be asked to forfeit its development aspirations in the name of global warming.
Doing anything to significantly combat global warming cannot be cheap. For the US (which produces 22 percent of all emissions), the costs could run into hundreds of billions of dollars. Even for developing countries which contribute a fraction, the cost would be big enough to put their entire economies in disarray. While the urgency of doing something is very real, the poor of the developing world cannot afford to pay the environmental bills of the industrialised rich. It is vital that policy-makers in the South – including in South Asia – recognise the not-so-subtle shift in US policy, understand its dire implications, and develop a concerted strategy to respond to it.