Tackling climate change: G20 has task cut out

Finance ministers belonging to the world's 20 leading economies are gathering in Scotland for the latest G20 summit, report CNBC-TV18's Sanjay Suri and Gautam Srinivasan.

St Andrews in Scotland is getting ready to play host to the finance ministers making up the G20. But the members arriving for the meeting have a tough task ahead of them. While they all agree that it is too soon to withdraw the fiscal stimulus measures given a still-fragile global economy, there is still no clarity on the big topic of discussion: tackling climate change.

Says Tony Juniper, Climate Campaigner, "They've had meetings during the summer and failed to come to any agreement and even in the EU last weekend it was only a very tentative agreement and a very broad figure without any actual commitment from the EU countries themselves. And so then taking the big group together including some of the big developing countries there and coming up with some proposals on financing, it seems like quite a stretch under the circumstances."

The EU proposed a grand figure of 100 billion euros a year by 2020 to cut emissions in developing countries. But nations can, at most, expect only a fraction of that, and that too, only eventually.

Adds Neil Bird, Overseas Development Institute, "First and foremost it is not all public funding. In fact less than half of this headline figure will likely come from government exchequers with the balance expected to come from the private sector. So it is likely that the amounts received in different countries will be much less."

The new proposal says all but the poorest nations must contribute. But a large country like India will need massive new funds.

"To develop things like renewable energy, to develop things like solar electricity, to develop ways of agriculture which provide food for the poor and yet at the same time aren't carbon intensive through the intensive use of things like fertilizers," says Owen Espley from Friends of the Earth. "This money can help trigger those kinds of investments. They should go alongside India's own choice of regulations and support to a low-carbon development pathway."

The G20 ministers are sitting across a sharp divide here. The developed countries themselves are divided, and certainly they are not in agreement with countries like India and China, who are straddling a duality as strong emerging economies, and polluters, but with their own needs also as developing nations. So who pays what, who gets what, how this is agreed, divided, delivered, and when, is very much in the air.