Frustration At India And China Over Watering Down Climate Deal

Sharma feared losing agreement over demand for compromise on coal

- Fiona Harvey and Rowena Mason

India and China will “have to explain themselves to poor nations” after watering down the Glasgow climate pact, the Cop26 president Alok Sharma warned yesterday, adding that their actions had left him “deeply frustrated”.

In the closing stages of the Cop26 summit, Sharma said he feared that the deal would be lost when China and India – both heavily dependent on coal power – attempted to reopen the text by objecting to a commitment to “phase out” coal.

They proposed instead the slightly weaker “phase down”, which implies that they could still carry on using coal in some way.

“We are on the way to consigning coal to history,” he told the Guardian. “This is an agreement we can build on. But in the case of China and India, they will have to explain to climate-vulnerable countries why they did what they did.”

At a press conference in Downing Street yesterday, Boris Johnson said the Glasgow deal, even with the slightly weaker wording, “sounded the death knell for coal power”. He said: “The conference marked the beginning of the end for coal. For the first time ever, the conference published a mandate to cut the use of coal power.”

The commitment, contained in the “cover decision” from the Cop26 summit, does not attach any deadline to the use of coal but is regarded as significant as it marks the first time such a resolution has been agreed by a UN climate conference.

Sharma accepted the compromise, he said, because “it was my view that otherwise, we might end up with no deal at all. We would have lost two years of really hard work, and would have ended up with nothing to show for it for developing countries.”