Time for the Global South to leverage DPI for climate action

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is unreasonable to expect developing countries to commit to costly climate mitigation strategies when the only reason developed nations are where they are is that they used cheap polluting technologies to get there. Having said that, global warming is real, and unless all countries commit to a more climate-friendly approach, we will have no hope of fighting it.

This is why, for the past three decades, the climate consensus has been that developed countries will bear the brunt of the cost that poorer countries will have to incur if they are to adopt the expensive green solutions that the world needs them to. However, with the US leaving the Paris Agreement, the old compact is unravelling quickly. We need a new approach—one that developing countries can adopt without having to depend on the whims of the developed world.

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was formally adopted, the countries of the world agreed to meet annually at a conference of parties (or CoP) to assess their progress towards their climate objectives. This led to the adoption, in 1997, of the Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement among all nation-states to legally bind themselves to reduce carbon emissions for the sake of future generations. It imposed common but differentiated obligations, with an obligation on industrialized nations to cut emissions by as much as 5% below 1990 levels.

As it happens, the Kyoto Protocol failed to achieve what it set out to do. In 2015, it was replaced by the Paris Accord. Under this revised agreement, all countries were expected to participate, and once they had set their climate targets, they were obliged to report