As G20 leaders prepare to meet in recently flooded New Delhi, climate policy issues are unresolved

NEW DELHI – Rekha Devi, a 30-year-old farm employee, is dreading the instant when her circle of relatives will likely be ordered to go away their makeshift tent atop a half-built overpass and go back to the Yamuna River floodplains underneath, the place their hut and small box of greens continues to be below water from July’s devastating rains.

Devi, her husband and their six kids fled because the record monsoon rains brought about flooding that killed greater than 100 other folks in northern India, displaced 1000’s and inundated huge portions of the capital, New Delhi. The waters took her husband’s paintings gear, the kids’s faculty uniforms and books and the entirety else the circle of relatives had gathered over two decades, forcing them and 1000’s of others into makeshift reduction camps.

Their transient perch is not up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the website online of this weekend’s Group of 20 summit at which leaders could have a last probability to make a decision how to higher offer protection to other folks like Devi when the following excessive climate tournament batters town. But she expects little — with the exception of eviction as a part of safety features for the conferences.

“If the leaders lived here, would they have taken their kids into the deep waters to live? Right now, no one is doing anything for us. We will see when they do something,” she stated.

Despite cyclones, excessive rains, landslides and excessive warmth affecting India and the remainder of the arena in the previous few months, climate ministers of the G20 countries — the arena’s biggest economies and manufacturers of maximum of its greenhouse gases —ended their closing assembly for the 12 months in July without resolving major disagreements on climate insurance policies.

Energy mavens stated key bottlenecks come with countries failing to agree on proposals to cap world emissions of carbon dioxide by way of 2025, arrange a carbon border tax, scale up renewable power, section down all fossil fuels and build up support to countries hit toughest by way of climate exchange.

Shayak Sengupta, an power and analysis fellow on the Observer Research Foundation America, conceded there have been no extensive agreements on decreasing fossil fuels or expanding renewables.

“However, I was encouraged to see that there were initiatives on specific sectors like green hydrogen, critical minerals, energy efficiency, finance for the energy transition and energy access,” stated Sengupta, based totally in Washington.

The G20’s best leaders could have a final probability to ship a powerful message of climate motion at their conferences on Saturday and Sunday.

The hope is that they “will be able to come out with an ambitious agenda that can not only show that the G20 can act but will also bolster confidence going into the global climate meetings in December,” said Madhura Joshi, energy analyst at the climate think tank E3G.

The annual global climate conference, COP28, will be held in Dubai this year. Joshi said she is hopeful because “writing off the world’s 20 largest economies completely would mean that there are more concerns for the world as a whole.”

Experts say one reason the talks among climate ministers haven’t produced concrete results is that the decisions necessary are bigger than those ministers can take.

“We need to ask if climate ministers have the mandate to negotiate now on these big issues like climate and energy,” said Luca Bergamaschi, CEO of Italian climate think tank Ecco Climate and former head of the Italian government’s climate team.

Beramaschi said India Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose nation holds the G20 presidency through November, has an opportunity step up as a global leader and “broker for international commitment between the West and the rest of the world,” especially in relation to climate and energy negotiations.

“We need leaders to say we need to do more” on climate change, Beramaschi said. “More on moving away from fossil fuels and increase renewable energy, I think that sends a really strong message.”

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Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India.

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