Apologies that it has been many weeks since I've written - it's not because I have been sitting idle! September was the busiest month working on climate change and energy issues in my year and a half in India. Internationally, we had UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon convening his High Level Meeting in New York, bringing together over a hundred Heads of State, including my Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to talk climate change. We had the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh where leaders discussed climate finance along with other top tier economic issues. We had key Ministers and lead negotiators from around the world meeting for the Greenland Dialogue and Major Economies Forum in the middle of the month. And official level delegations came together in Bangkok for the latest round of UN negotiations 28 September - 9 October. So the pace is certainly picking up as Copenhagen approaches. The other positive new note in September outside India was the election of a new Government...

To the Institute of Defence and Strategic Analysis (IDSA) in New Delhi over the weekend for a fascinating panel discussion with some of India's climate change A team, including Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and Prime Minister's Special Envoy Shyam Saran for the government, Nitin Desai, Ligia Norona and Arvind Gupta from influential think-tanks The Energy Resource Institute (TERI) and IDSA. The occasion was the launch of a working group report on the security implications of climate change for India. This is a subject of increasing concern for Western security thinkers too. The concern is not that climate change will lead to war in itself, but that it will act as a "threat multiplier", increasing the risk of conflict and reducing human security. It's not difficult to envision how this might play out in South Asia. Take the obvious example of water: it's an increasingly scarce resource for India and its neighbours, so security analysts often focus on the implications of the melting of Himalayan...

In the climate negotiations two unhelpful attitudes are all too common: us and them, and after you. 17 years ago, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a world which codified "us" and "them", "Annex 1" and "non-Annex 1", "the developed world" and "the developing world". In 2009, a world of such binary opposites is even less real than it was in 1992. Especially when the "developing world" includes South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, along with Tuvalu, Lesotho and Nepal. Unless the international community can find some way to break down this binary, sooner rather than later, our collective response to the climate challenge will be too slow and too weak. As long as this unhelpful binary exists, it reinforces an "after you" dynamic in the negotiations, or "I won't show you mine until you show me yours". All countries are guilty of this to some extent. In the UK and EU we have done more than most to...

Friday was a busy day for the British Government on climate change. With 161 days to go until the UN climate conference in Copenhagen lots of the Government's big guns were in action. Firstly, PM Gordon Brown gave a major speech in which he set out how much money should be provided to cut greenhouse gas emissions and help vulnerable countries adapt to its unavoidable impacts: around $100 billion per year by 2020. He also set out key principles to determine how that climate finance should be raised and spent:

• Contribution to and allocation of climate finance should be equitable
• Funds should be additional to the money the UK and other countries have already committed for overseas development assistance and to meet the Millennium Development Goals
• The sources of funding should be predictable, to allow long-term investment
• And there should be shared governance arrangements of how climate finance is spent, to give developing countries a stronger voice and ensure...

  Posted by Fergus Auld at 15 : 19 hrs | 0 comments