International

G20 Summit In Flooded New Delhi As Climate Issues Remain Unresolved

Published

1 year ago

Sep 6, 2023.

Eko Hot Blog reports that Rekha Devi, a 30-year-old farmworker, dreads the moment when her family will be ordered to leave their makeshift tent atop a half-built overpass and return to the Yamuna River floodplains below. Their hut and small field of vegetables are still submerged in water from July’s devastating rains.

Editor’s Pick

Devi, her husband, and their six children fled as the record monsoon rains triggered flooding that claimed the lives of more than 100 people in northern India. It displaced thousands and inundated significant parts of the capital, New Delhi. The floodwaters swept away her husband’s work tools, the children’s school uniforms and books, and everything else the family had accumulated over 20 years. This forced them, along with thousands of others, into makeshift relief camps.

Their temporary perch is less than 10km (6 miles) from the site of this weekend’s Group of 20 (G20) summit. During this summit, leaders will have a final chance to decide how to better protect people like Devi when the next extreme weather event hits the city.

However, she expects little, except eviction as part of security measures for the meetings.

“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 said.

Despite cyclones, extreme rains, landslides, and extreme heat affecting India and the rest of the world in recent months, climate ministers of the G20 nations—the world’s largest economies and major greenhouse gas producers—ended their last meeting for the year in July without resolving significant disagreements on climate policies.

Energy experts said key bottlenecks include nations failing to agree on proposals to cap global carbon dioxide emissions by 2025, set up a carbon border tax, scale up renewable energy, phase down all fossil fuels, and increase aid to nations most affected by climate change.

Shayak Sengupta, an energy and research fellow at the Observer Research Foundation America, admitted that there were no broad agreements on reducing fossil fuels or increasing 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,” said Sengupta, based in Washington.

Further Reading

The G20’s top leaders will have a final chance to send a strong message of climate action at their meetings on Saturday and Sunday.

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

Click To Watch Our Video Of The Week