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This year marks three decades since the landmark Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The summit was a watershed moment, setting the principles for global climate cooperation and enshrining equity in climate governance. A new video podcast by Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) features Sunita Narain, Director General of CSE, and Anumita Roychowdhury, Executive Director of CSE, in conversation with Avantika Goswami. Narain and Roychowdhury, both attendees of the Summit in 1992, discuss the significance of Rio, lessons learned, and the path ahead during times of turmoil and change.
The mood at Rio (1992)
ARC: The excitement and the expectations were immense. For the first time, we were creating a multilateral process to address the most serious survival crisis. Imagine—125 countries, 12,000 people and 100 heads of state. That was the attention this issue got. What Rio gave us were the key guiding principles. The Rio Declaration integrated the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR), established sovereign rights over resources, talked about sustainable consumption, and safeguards against discriminatory trade rules.
The Global South played a very impressive role at Rio. The North tried diversionary tactics like a legally-binding Forest Convention to police the world’s forests. The Global South, with India playing a significant role, mobilised and killed it, replacing it with principles instead. Moreover, the Global South got a Desertification Treaty as well as the Biodiversity Convention (which the US did not want). It showed that with a common position, the Global South can get a much better deal.
SN: At Rio, we felt enormous excitement about saving the world. But there was also a chess game about vested interests. The big issue was climate. The Europeans wanted an ambitious agreement but whittled it down under US pressure by the time they reached Rio. The Americans, under President George Bush Senior, were clear they would not take on any supranational agreement that curbed national growth.
The strength at the time was India, China, and the G77. We were not naysayers. We were demanding rules of fairness which took into account that the atmosphere was the world’s largest commons. We needed equity and climate justice to have cooperation. So, while we did not get targets at Rio, we got an element of fairness built in: countries that created the problem must be the first movers (called Annex 1 countries), reduce emissions, and vacate space. They would enable the flow of technology and finance so the rest could grow without pollution. If you rewrote it today, you could not do better. The last 30 years have been spent trying to dilute those principles.
The Rio outcome: What we got right, and what went wrong
SN: We got the principles of equity right. Global negotiations need a foundation of trust and principled positions, not transactions. Rio embedded those principles in climate, but we have lost those building blocks over time. Once the Berlin Wall came down, commerce overrode the principled positions. Trade negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO) took over, free trade flowed, China joined global trade, and emissions did not come down in the West, while manufacturing moved to China — the world lost the plot.
ARC: The principles were needed, but we could not create the right framework to crystallise and institutionalise the principles. Now, with economic downturns and rising protectionism, the cracks are showing. Further, we did not notice the power shift happening as the traditional North-South geopolitics shifted to Asia and China because of big changes in global manufacturing. The Rio process could not respond to that.
SN: But that was not Rio’s fault, it was Paris’s fault (the Paris Agreement was a climate treaty adopted in 2015). The Paris Accord rewrote the principles of Rio. It removed the rules-based system, so you could not move a country like China from one side of the table to the other. It created a free-for-all, leading to a situation where the world’s most powerful leader can say he does not believe in climate change and the whole deck of cards collapses.
The missing link: Rio’s ambition and failure to implement decarbonisation pathways
SN: This is really a ‘development’ question, wherein the discussions should have been shaped by the co-benefits of environmental management and development.
ARC: Today, we are looking for contextualised, bottom-up economic solutions driven by countries and regions. However, this must be supported by the global policy and finance architecture. For the first time, we are becoming more conscious of the development dynamics of the Global South, which is the critical issue here. For instance, the finance conversation has matured over the years, where previously it was about the Global South requiring funds and the ‘$100 billion’ prefix. Now, development is being connected with the debt burden, the cost of investment and global distortionary policies. We are talking about an agenda being driven by local imperatives. The question, then, is how to help the Global South reduce their cost of transition.
SN: The difference between Rio and now is that even though the Global South played a big role in Rio, it did not own the agenda. The environmental agenda was seen as a threat and as conditionalities from the Global North. But today, the South is beginning to have an agenda that is distinctly different. For example, when talking about transport as a contributor to climate change, while the West talks about electric cars, we talk about mobility transformation—to use scarce, conflict-driven minerals more prudently and efficiently. For us, the agenda cannot be anti-development, the agenda on environment has to be development.
Thinking about what went wrong for 30 years, the inequalities in the structures meant that we could not get messages out from our world that were loud enough or strong enough. We needed to be on the table with a different point of view, which is also what we require now.
What does equity mean today?
ARC: So far, we have focused on equity as a guiding principle, but it is critical that we understand what operationalising equity means. At the macro level, we need just and fair sharing of the carbon space, but how to do that? Equity, therefore, has to be embedded everywhere as a defining parameter in trade policies, financing strategies, and strategy development—which means ensuring equity in terms of access to capital, markets, raw materials and supply chains. The operational framework of equity must become clearer for multilateralism and cooperation to work.
SN: Equity is an imperative now more than ever—70 per cent of the world still requires the right to development. But, the conversation is not as simple as equity and climate—we need to take the trade issue along with climate. If the Global South remains in an export-driven commodity system, it will discount its environment. Given the turbulence in the world today due to President Trump’s approach, we require a conversation about rewriting trade rules and environmentalism so it is not about more loans adding to debt burdens but rather providing countries with enabling tools so they can develop differently. I think that, to me, is where the soul of Rio, of 1992 will find a freshness today.
The old world is dying: How does the South come together to push for a new green regime?
SN: While Donald Trump’s second term has been highly disruptive for green growth, his disruptive approach may also push new alliances. The answer may be ‘neolocalisation’—reinvesting in our local economies to build resilience, livelihoods and sustainability to counter this broken globalised world.
ARC: The development trajectory in the Global South is pacing up, meaning new opportunities and new alliances on technology. If that is green-technology oriented, you create new market pools. The Global South is not homogeneous, but there is scope for alignment. Different regions will innovate differently since their circumstances and compulsions are different. If growth is connected to green solutions, we can offset the disruption driven by Trump.
This article is an edited version of the Carbon Politics podcast featuring Sunita Narain and Anumita Roychowdhury. Watch the full episode here.