Climate Change Policy for Developing Countries

The paper attempts to take stock of what has been achieved in the COP-26 meetings held in Glasgow in November 2021 and suggest the course of action that developing countries should follow in subsequent negotiations. The authors assess that there was progress in several areas, but many critical issues remain unresolved. Developing countries need to evolve a constructive approach that can carry the dialogue further and fill in the remaining critical gaps.

The paper is organised as follows:
Section 1 presents a brief review of climate change negotiations to show that despite apparently irreconcilable differences between the developed and developing countries in the early stages, the negotiations were successful in narrowing these differences very considerably over time.
Section 2 summarises the findings of the IPCC on the impacts of a rise in global temperature of 2°C and above, which was a critical input into COP-26.
Section 3 reviews the outcomes of COP-26 and indicates the areas where more remains to be done.
Section 4 presents the authors’ assessment of what developing countries have to do to implement their COP-26 commitments.
Section 5 discusses the scale of financial support developing countries will need to achieve climate-related goals.
Section 6 gives recommendations on how developing countries should now proceed.