Rich nations must accelerate emission reduction, says India at Belem ahead of COP30

New Delhi: On the eve of the UN climate summit, India has asked the rich nations to “accelerate emission reduction” in order to reach “net zero sooner than what they had declared,” noting that global ambition to clean up the earth remains inadequate even a decade after the Paris Agreement.

“While developing countries continue to take decisive climate action, developed countries that have disproportionately appropriated the global carbon budget must accelerate emission reductions,” Dinesh Bhatia, Indian Ambassador to Brazil said on Saturday at a Leader’s Summit at Belem where the 30^th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) will take off on Monday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unlikely to attend the two-weeks long summit, but Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav will join the negotiations at the high-level segment towards the end.

Addressing a pre-COP summit, Bhatia said ten years after the Paris Agreement that set the ground rules on emission cuts, global ambition remained inadequate and many nations’ Nationally Determined Contributions - voluntary emission cuts – fell short.

USA – the world’s largest polluter – came out of the Paris Agreement for the second time in January 2025 after President Donald Trump took over.

“Given the rapid depletion of the meagre remaining carbon budget, developed countries must reach net zero much sooner than they have declared and invest substantially in reaching net-negative emissions,” the Ambassador said.

Net Zero means adding no greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by reducing the emission and absorbing the GHGs released from the industry, transportation, electricity and agriculture sectors in massive carbon sinks like oceans and forests.

Australia, the UK and European Union have pledged to achieve net-zero by 2050, but the USA, the world’s biggest pollution, has no such deadline. India declared that it would achieve net-zero by 2070 while China and Saudi Arabia put a deadline of 2060.

With adaptation – successfully adjusting to warmer climate caused by global warming - being a key issue at COP30, Bhatia said focus on adaptation would be as important as mitigation (emission cuts) in order to address climate risks and vulnerabilities at the local level and more so in developing countries.

At Belem, the nations are to finalise a set of 100 indicators to track progress on adaptation besides revisiting the need to enhance adaptation finance.

Earlier this year, a block of like-minded developing countries demanded that climate finance from the developed countries must be “additional, predictable and transparent” rather than essentially renaming existing grants and aids programmes.

“For developing nations like India, access to affordable finance, technology and capacity building is vital to implement ambitious NDCs. Equitable, predictable and concessional finance remains the cornerstone for achieving global climate goals,” the Ambassador said.

Bhatia said India would be joining Brazil's proposal of creating the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) corpus as an observer. The South American nation has proposed to make a $125 billion fund with contributions from all sources to reward tropical countries to retain and expand their forest cover.