The summit Ban is organising will have more than 120 heads of state and is expected to be bigger than the 2009 Copenhagen conference, the biggest climate meeting so far. The UN secretary general has pinned high hopes on the meeting as he realises that the UN climate negotiations have not moved further all these years. And there are fears that the next year’s ultimate meeting in Paris for a global climate deal might collapse just as Copenhagen conference did five years ago.

Blame the other

Ban’s idea is to secure political support that can help prepare the groundwork in Peru this November, that is at the penultimate climate meet before the global agreement due next year.

US president Barack Obama and many other heads of state from major economies are going to attend the climate summit on the 23rd of this month. But meaningfully missing from the scene will be the chief executives of the world’s first and third largest carbon emitters—China and India. Without them, how can the political support for a global climate deal be secured?

“I expect each country to put forth a clear vision of placing the world on a trajectory to keep temperature rise within 2 degrees centigrade and to confirm support for a meeting in Paris next year intended to reach an agreement on how to achieve that vision,” Ban has said about the meet.

What Xi’s representative will say at the meeting remains to be seen; although China has always stated that its first priority is development while it would try to pursue a low carbon economy but without any binding commitment.

What Modi’s representative—Indian environment minister Prakash Javadekar—could say is, however, quite predictable. After a recent meeting of Brazil, South Africa, India and China (Basic), a bloc of fast emerging economies in the UN climate negotiations, the Indian minister claimed that these countries were far ahead of developed countries in terms of cutting down carbon emissions. “Our climate change mitigation efforts are more  than those of the developed countries,” he told me during an interview I did for the BBC after a meeting with other Basic-countries. “We are going ahead with our voluntary actions which will reduce carbon emissions and also increase energy efficiency from 25 percent to 50 percent. We want the developed world to walk the talk.” Javadekar even specifically mentioned the Basic bloc’s main rivals. “After the US discovered shale gas and following their economic downturn, they have shown that their emissions have gone down, but that is not real,” he said. “Europe too has to do much more than what they are doing now.”

Discussing responsibilities

Unless there is a major policy shift, the Basic bloc will stick to these very arguments. This is a step ahead of their earlier entrenched position that compulsory carbon cuts should only apply to developed countries because they were the ones who emitted heat-trapping greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution.

The bloc has been arguing that it is now their turn to carry out development works and, therefore, they cannot make mandatory carbon cuts.

This, they say, is the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. But in recent years, developed countries have begun to strongly argue that without getting the world’s major emitters like China and India on board, there can be no global deal. “Developing nations with some of the fastest rising levels of carbon pollution are going to have to take action to meet this challenge alongside us,” US President Barack Obama had said while announcing his climate policy in 2013. “They are watching what we do, but we’ve got to make sure that they are stepping up to the plate as well.”

To counter this, the Basic bloc has now come up with the argument that they are already way ahead of the developed world in cutting down carbon emissions. In all probability, representatives of this grouping will deliver this message loud and clear during the climate summit in New York next week. In other words, the fast emerging economies will be saying they will not agree to any legally binding carbon-cut commitment. The absence of Xi and Modi will further stamp that assertion.

Writing an opinion piece for the Hindu newspaper just before embarking on an India-visit this week, Xi chose to mention climate change as the first area of cooperation and coordination between his country and India. That cooperation was clearly about  fortifying the two Asian giants against the developed world in climate politics. Otherwise, his piece—peppered with words like prosperity, development, growth, business and manufacturing—would definitely have dwelt on the challenges of climate change.

Flexible deal

So, does that mean Ban’s climate summit will just be a talk shop?

“It is up to each government to decide what it will bring to the Summit,” Ban has said about the meeting. “Be it new levels of emissions, new climate finance, new climate actions on the ground or all of the above.” The wide range of choices made available for countries attending the summit signals that the Secretary General may have sensed the high risk of sticking to just one goal—a legally binding global climate deal. He must have remembered what Obama had said when he brought his climate policy: “We need

an agreement that’s flexible—because different nations have different needs.”

That mantra may work for the climate summit next week, might also broker a global deal next year. But the question is: will it save the planet?

Khadka is a BBC journalist based in London and can be reached at

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