Sunita Narain heads India's Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-governmental, public interest research and advocacy organization set up for research, lobbying and communicating on issues of sustainable and equitable development. The centre's efforts include spreading awareness, research and advocacy, education and training, building a knowledge base, and pollution monitoring.

Sunita Narain is the best-known and most prominent among the green thinkers in India - of which there are not many in the public space - and was listed by TIME as one of India's most influential personalities. CSE's extensive researched output is available in online and print periodicals, one of which is ‘Down to Earth'. In the first issue of the New Year, its editor Ms Narain has penned her frank and forthright take on the Poznan Climate change deliberations in December 2008.

Ms Narain came away with the feeling that "the world is in deep trouble and deeper denial... The rich world has realized it is easy to talk big, but tough to take steps to actually reduce emissions. The agreement was that these countries would reduce so that the developing world could increase. Instead, between 1990 and 2006, their carbon dioxide emissions increased by a whopping 14.5 per cent; even green countries of Europe are unable to match words with action."

At Poznan, rich countries "aggressively pushed a new climate-tack". Since they found out that they could not meet targets at home, they would

• buy emission reduction certificates from the third world to offset their emissions,
• pay to protect emission-absorbing forests,
• pump carbon deep underground.

Writing from a south perspective, Ms Narain, notes that all efforts at Poznan focused on devising such effortless means - pay developing countries to stop deforestation. Reason? The Nick Stern report of 2006 includes this assessment - "Emissions from deforestation are very significant - they are estimated to represent more than 18% of global emissions, a share greater than is produced by the global transport sector", and a suggestion that "Curbing deforestation is a highly cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

This mechanism - reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) - "is being built with absolutely no understanding that forests here are not mere carbon sticks to beat the world's conscience with, or sinks for garbage carbon, but habitats of millions of people. There is no comprehension of the role forests play in a developing country's economy or in people's lives. Instead, the intent is misbegotten and single-minded: pay as cheaply as possible to buy rights over forests in the developing world and build as many accounting and certification procedures as possible to make sure there are no ‘leakages' in the transaction.

It is clearly a great business for the crashed and failed consultancy companies of the western world - creative carbon accounting, this time in the forests of the poor. So, this opportunity, which could have enjoined the interests of forest-economies and its people to plant, protect and manage forests so that the world would in addition get the benefit of reducing emissions, is being lost to the self-interest of greedy polluters."

There is more to come. Not enough signs of shedding the fossil fuel habit are evident, so, "at Poznan, the second move was to aggressively push for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies - a delicious but still experimental and expensive way to bury carbon dioxide emitted from power plants deep underground... the developed world... would simply buy carbon credits to invest in this technology in the developing world. More seriously, we would become guinea pigs, for very little is still known of CCS's risks and viability. As a Venezuelan delegate at the plenary asked, why, if this was such a great technology, was the developed world not building more CCS plants in its own backyard?"

More inconsiderate plans have been tabled during and after the Poznan meet.

• European Union's climate package reveals "a grand 20/20/20 objective - 20 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020, over its 1990 levels; 20 per cent renewables and 20 per cent energy efficiency target. But what the package forgets to highlight is that 80 per cent of these targets will be achieved through ‘offsets' - payments for action abroad".
• The Labour government in Australia (which touted climate to garner votes) has come up with a "gutless" "devastating" "cowardly" climate policy, after the Poznan meet. Australia plans to reduce emissions by just 5%, by 2020, which means - as protesters have explained, that "the Australian Government is willing to sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef to appease the big polluting companies that are fuelling global climate change." (from Wikinews)

Post-Poznan it appears that even champions of the environment Tony Blair, Al Gore, Nick Stern and others "have all bought this position - hook, line and sinker. They are madly running around the world convincing Indians and Chinese to change their behaviour and join the game. They all don't speak of their country's emissions. They only use our black smoke as their shield."

Let's hope the doesn't South tow the same line, and decide to emit merrily, then fund even poorer nations to take care of it. Governments and thinkers of the third world have just landed even more onerous tasks to take on, based on evidence and other's experience and blunders.  Let's hope they take on this cause with greater perspective and will. 

Related Reading:
Australia Sabotages Climate Negotiations
Carbon Markets: What's in it for the Poor?