 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another capsule of international relations for the Shankar AAS Academy. Today, we will discuss the group of 20 summit, which was held in Rome last two days, 30th and 31st of October. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi is personally attending this meeting, it attracted more than the usual attention in India. Not only that, this meeting has been held at a very critical time in the history of the world, just as G20 was formed. G20 was formed after 2007-2008 economic crisis, to deal with the very grave situation that arose in the world economy in that particular time. And since then, it has been meeting every year to review the world situation, and they may have applied some correctives to some routine decisions and so on. The difference between G20 and, say, the Security Council is that in G20, everybody is equal, nobody has a veto path. And therefore, G20 is emerging as some kind of an alternative, an economic alternative to the Security Council, because all the important countries are present there, but they are all on equal status. And also, these 20 countries represent 80% of global GDP, 75% of global trade, and 60% of the population. So it virtually represents the whole world in terms of GDP, in terms of trade, and in terms of the population. So the present situation, first, of course, the pandemic, second, the world health, pandemic is a world health crisis, and also world economic crisis following the pandemic. And inability of the United Nations to act on it, because of China's role as a permanent member, who vetoed any suggestion that the Security Council should meet. So in these three circumstances, the meeting of the G20 assumed tremendous amount of importance. And when you look at the result, and of course, I should have mentioned climate change. So this is actually the climate change summit started today. So this took place just before the COP26, Conference of Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP26, it is called. And it has a summit segment, two days, the heads of states are meeting. So in that context, G20 actually became, if we look at the outcome, we look like a rehearsal of COP26. Because most of the time of G20 meeting was devoted to the climate change issue. So virtually every shade of opinion in the United Nations was present there. And therefore, the discussion took place basically to prepare for the COP26. And that is the other fact that was the most significant part of G20 meeting. It also dealt with some other issues like global taxation and private public participation, etc. But even though we don't have all the details of what happened with the G20, the most prominent part of the decision making there was on climate change. Because climate change is on the way to changing tracks again. The climate change strategy was developed in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Then it changed in 2015 in the Paris Agreement. And now in Glasgow, it is supposed to take another change. We'll come to that later. But Italy, which chaired the summit, Italian Prime Minister, said that he was satisfied with the outcome of G20. But then immediately he added that this is only a start. We must not forget that. We must remember that it is only a start. And taking the decisions or the positions taken by the G20, which of course will go now to the COP26 where everybody will be there. The main effort of the United States and partly China was to abandon the Paris formula. Paris formula, as you know, is to or was to make voluntary reduction in greenhouse gases. So every country says how much they can reduce. And then you put it all together. And the temperature should not go up beyond two degrees Celsius. And that was the objective of the Paris Agreement. Now people say that even two degrees Celsius is too much. It should be 1.5 degrees Celsius. So one decision, technical decisions, I will say that G20 took was that the effort should be to make sure, commit ourselves to making sure that the global warming should not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is very hard to accomplish. And therefore it is only an objective. That is, all our efforts in future should be to making sure that the global temperature should not go beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that is a wish, whether it can happen. The suspicion is that it may not happen. But the more pressing thing that the suppose 1.5 is already an objective. But what the United States wanted was to forget about voluntary reduction of emissions etc. And go straight forward in net zero carbon situation. When can you do a net carbon situation? And United States already said by 2030 they will be able to do that. China has said that 2060 they will be able to do that. And several others have fixed different years. And India is under tremendous pressure like other developing countries to declare a year because that means by that year our consumption of energy should peak and then start reducing. And that is when it becomes a zero carbon, net zero carbon situation. And so the push in COP26 is to make everybody declare this. And the leadership of the objection to this or a different approach to this is India. And the arguments that India is making are the same old arguments we have been making before Rio de Janeiro. And all through these negotiations we have been taking a fundamental position that developing countries need energy to develop. And therefore it is unfair and just for developing countries to ask to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because their emissions are not very high if you take per capita. An average Indian emission is one fourth of an average American emission. So this is our argument we have been saying is all through. And therefore if we have to to get used environment friendly technology we need the technology and the money. If we don't do that we'll not be able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And nor can we declare a year as net carbon year, net zero. And so this is the argument which India put forward India as usual leading the developing countries of the world in this argument as against the developed countries. And that division has been existing also in Rio we came to some kind of a compromise. But the developed countries walked out of it when they refused to sign Kyoto. And so we got Paris and now they are leaving out Paris also and say now we started a new a Glasgow formula. So what happened in the G20 was since everybody their all our opinions are reflected that's what will probably happen in COP2. They said that we must have a 1.5 degrees Celsius only below that. And secondly we should strive not to they're not willing to designate a year. They're saying they should strive to find a year in the middle of the century. People are saying 2050, 2016. So all countries must strive to accommodate and find a date which is suitable for them and declare themselves a net carbon net zero emission country. And so that is a year as we can go to but I don't know whether in COP26 they will change it any further. So the position of the developing countries which India is championing and so the developing country's viewpoint was put forward by India and that has been registered. So whatever discussion that will take place in COP26. And therefore the position that developing countries particularly India has put forward is that we must concentrate on the climate goals, what these goals are and then try to achieve it through financing and developing of green energy for the developing countries. Because developing countries are bound to use fossil fuels particularly coal. So one of the movements is to avoid using a coal altogether. As you know India has the largest deposits of coal and we are very much dependent on it. So unless we develop alternate strategies for energy in a big way we simply cannot stop using coal. So they are using some techniques like not allowing countries to know the countries which develop industries etc on the basis of coal they discourage it. The developed countries will not invest in coal industry etc and China and India are being accused of using too much of coal. So the obligations of the developed countries have been highlighted, financing for environment friendly technology and the cost of developing green energy. And again the argument that we used was the very same one and I used to be the chief negotiator in Berlin in 1995. The speeches I used to make there were the same speeches that have been made today. Like one of the things that we say is that we have to cut down wasteful consumption. See the whole world has been depleted of many of its resources because nobody bothered about it during the industrial revolution. Everybody was consuming those rich countries were consuming all the energy and now that the world has been deprived of it and there is this great calamity comes. They are saying developing countries should not develop or you should not use coal, you should not use fuels and how can they develop? So this is the dilemma. So the call was for cutting down wasteful consumption, conspicuous consumption. The phrase used is what the developed countries are using is what is called luxury emissions while what developing countries need is survival emissions. So the same argument which I used to make they are still making. So on energy climate instead of focusing only on climate goals the situations of developing countries in various needs of the developing countries must be focused. So that has been presented. How it will be accepted in Glasgow we don't know. Then G20 identified sustainable and responsible consumption and production. So the developed countries also seem to have agreed to this along with provision of finance and technology as critical enablers of achieving climate goals. So this is the same old point that climate goals mean you must enable developing countries to grow. For that developed countries have to reduce emissions so that there is some more space for developing countries to emit greenhouse gases for their own development. And also it was pointed out and Prime Minister Modi himself spoke about sustainable lifestyles. The amount of machines they use, the amount of energy they consume every day can be reduced. The number of air conditions could be reduced, number of cars could be produced. So he stressed the sustainable lifestyles and they pointed out also that this is one of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations adopted by the entire UN. So this has to be done. But of course developed countries will never listen to that because that means their lifestyles have to change. So this energy intensive lifestyle of the developed countries was questioned. And they should invest in the developing countries where developing countries are improving their livelihoods. In the developing countries it is the livelihoods that have been improved but in the developed countries it is a luxury. And so all these marginal people, marginal farmers etc should be helped so that living livelihoods are not destroyed either by the pandemic or by climate change. So G20 talked about developing, developed countries should not shift the goalposts. Every time they say in 92 they said something, but in 15 they said something and now they are shifting the goalpost an expression relating to football. You play in a ground and then you get accustomed to a legal position and then you suddenly find when you go to the ground the goalposts have been shifted and how do you play there? And so this was said that we should do more for the planet and put the money where their mouths are the developed countries. So meaningful and effective action has been repeated in many places in the declaration of G20 but there is no concrete action. There has been no agreement on concrete action because emission have to be controlled and it cannot be controlled only by the developing countries. So there has been a suggestion that coal should be dispensed with which of course many developing countries will not accept so they are saying that they will not finance coal projects for power generation. You use nuclear or you use wind energy or solar energy etc. So if you ask for investments in coal-fired power generation the developed countries will not cooperate. This is something we know but we have to carry on and so at the end of it they have said that this is the last chance. Glasgow is the last chance for humanity to save itself from damnation and that is the conclusion and then they have said about other things like private public partner should be encouraged and no time bound decision on climate change, no commitment to ending domestic coal consumption. So these are some of the and these were pushed by India for safeguarding the interests of developing countries. So this will be now a traditional role right from the beginning. So in the Paris Agreement there was a commitment to provide $100 billion to the developing countries. It was not realized. So they recommitted themselves to producing this $100 billion nobody knows who will pay it but there is a commitment that that commitment was definitely to be renewed and G20 recommended that. What will happen in COP26 we don't know but this is an old commitment. It has not been delivered so it is natural that they should be accepted and then on COVID-19 they took some good decisions about vaccine production greater vaccine equality because in many countries there are problems even we have a problem about one of our vaccines not being recognized. So the G20 asked WHO to recognize all possible vaccines and of course they cannot do it without trials and so on but they asked WHO to recognize more vaccines and more international public and private funding not only for vaccines but also for green projects. So there was but as I earlier mentioned there is a compromise in the G20 as against people who want countries to be identified I mean years to be identified as net zero. Now what the G20 says is that stress the key relevance of achieving global net zero on carbon emissions around mid-section. You know in the UN always you find a compromise language which is good for everybody. So we have not committed to a day or a year but we have said which is important to find a day and an indication that that could be in the middle of the century which can be 2050, can be 2060, even 2070 you can consider it middle of the century. So that is a big compromise of G20 between developed and developing countries and recognition of all whites etc and India's position has not changed as I said from the beginning. So we are asking for climate justice so we are willing to reduce emissions as well as possible that we are committed to that but any kind of forced fixing of date is not acceptable to us. India does not have adequate techniques in fact another issue this was new that India raised is a clean energy we can produce maybe but it's not enough that you produce clean energy we must have the grit to hold it you know what I mean because they if you provide green energy and if you use it immediately that's not good for the future. So large amounts of clean energy even if you produce it we don't have a grid and therefore more money will have to be spent on the grid stability. So clean energy is not as deep as they think because the creation of grids will cost money and that has also been highlighted. So the United Nations Secretary General at the end of the G20 meeting expressed his disappointment that no decision was taken about a particular year when it will become when the world will become net zero year but then he said my wish has not been buried and I hope that this will be further discussed in COP26 which has just happened today. So these are the basic climate change decisions or recommendations that G20 has made then there are some other subjects which would have been very important to keep climate change was not in the focus and that is about money laundering you know you may know that there is an organization called Financial Action Task Force FATF this was established in 1989 it's a governmental group to combat money laundering and terrorist financing and this has been watching it and reporting to the world. So as you know you might have heard that Pakistan is now there is a white list a gray list and a black list so the black list of countries are fully accountable they are responsible for many of these terrorists financing and but Pakistan is not in the black category because they have been fighting it and so they came into the gray category and then now they are trying to be in the white category means they are not doing counter money laundering or terrorist financing so the G20 decided to strengthen this and also to make sure that the international financial system should not be challenged by these countries and the latest in the list is Turkey has been recently added to the gray list because Turkey is supposed to have that money laundering so that is another thing that they decided that enhanced confidence in the digital environment because there is always this threat of cyber crimes and cyber attacks cyber warfare etc etc and also by sheer default sometimes serious things can happen you know a virus can get into your system and destroy the whole system so it has become it becomes a warfare if you deliberately do it but sometimes it can happen also by mistake and so enhanced confidence in the digital environment because it has several elements I'm not going to all those details this is one of the things that they have supported then zero tolerance for corruption corruption of course is a is a major disease of the whole world economy and in Vienna when I was there in 2003 the United Nations formulated a convention against corruption a UN convention against corruption and that was signed by many countries etc but still corruption is rampant in particularly in developing countries even developed countries are not free from corruption but mostly developing countries but developing countries it's kind of small corruption at the individual level but in the developed countries it is at the highest level huge corporations millions of dollars is what you hear so corruption is only a matter of degree and it's all over the place and therefore G20 demanded that there should be zero tolerance on corruption and one of the points that is always discussed in the cost corruption is you commit a corrupt practice somewhere and take the money and put it in a in a bank in Switzerland so does Switzerland have an irresponsibility for this because Switzerland can say this money came legally to our bank they cannot ask where you got this money from but the governments have been the concerned governments have been asking for them to return the money and the most famous cases of the Philippine president Marcos the billions of dollars he has stacked up in Geneva banks and it was all government's money and the government fought very hard and finally the Swiss banks returned the money to Philippines government there have been other cases also like that but the responsibility is of that government to prove that it was illegal money it's not enough that you say that he took away this money without the permission of the government but how did you earn it in the first instance suppose he earned it in a legitimate manner then can he be punished should that money be given you want to state it's a long discussion I participated in it in Vienna and so this was also very important decision then the taxation system you may have heard when G7 met one of the decisions they took was to make it uniform the taxation system of big corporates and they had come to an agreement that it should be only 15% or at least 15% taxation could be made of international investors and this has also been reiterated in the sense that G20 has approved this decision further strengthened in the economic regime so in the first instance pandemic was dealt with international cooperation was stressed that all organizations must cooperate to fight this and vaccine justice all human beings or anywhere in the world should have the same access to vaccines therefore international cooperation as you know in the quad there is already an agreement that you know some countries will have a innovation some countries have money and some countries are manufacturing capability the vaccine did not succeed because each one was trying to do things that they don't have you have innovation but no money you have money but you have no manufacturing capability so in the new quad Israel India UAE United States part which has just been formed they have said that Israel has innovation UAE has money India has capability and the US will give the kind of umbrella to operate this and that is the situation as well as quad is concerned that's in other words international cooperation that has been stressed the only problem there was China was not allowing United Nations to take any action because they were afraid that the accusation will come to them even the investigation as to where the virus came from has not been completed but China is not giving the right answers or the right data so in other words virtually G20 meeting because of its such close proximity to the COP26 was hijacked by the climate change issue that is what happened because everybody was preoccupied with what to say it's COP26 and so they decided to shape some compromises otherwise again this whole thing so my feeling is that COP26 the discussion will start on the basis of some of the agreements reached in G20 and then each country will try to push its position and finally some kind of a compromise was made in the COP26 and then we will see that is inadequate so we'll have to then go for another another climate change plan so 92 climate change plan Rio you can say 1.0 1.0 then Paris would be 2.0 and now after Glasgow 3.0 but in the meantime ice is melting sea level is rising floods are taking place all over the place droughts and seasonal rains so it's quite true that we have ruined the earth and the earth is striking back and so this is the time if you waste the time today our succeeding generations will have no air to breathe or food to eat and that is a dangerous situation so we owe to our next generations to do something when we still are capable of breathing and of course pandemic it is obvious then there is the terrorist threat another thing that they dealt with before they didn't talk about Chinese threat since the China is part of the G20 but I'm sure on the sidelines they must have discussed China they must have discussed Afghanistan another hot issue but no formally they may be simply talked about terrorism which is actually Afghanistan so on the whole the discussions have helped to understand the issues as far as climate change is concerned the conference of parties will decide and on other things G20's recommendations will definitely be respected and implemented by the G20 nations which as I said the big chunk of the world the whole world is not there but all the important countries are there and therefore what they decide and what they do will have an impact on the whole world so thank you very much well that is you know when you talk about climate change you cannot say temperature should be brought down full stop right because that kind of capability every country does not and the developing countries have a need to increase so and that was what was accepted in Rio de Janeiro they said common but differentiated responsibilities I've heard that word originally we kept saying main responsibility of developed countries and they kept saying common responsibility of all countries okay so the final compromise I still remember in Geneva at three o'clock in the morning somebody said why not common but differentiated responsibility that became the mantra or the bible of the negotiations and that is what helped in the Rio de Janeiro meeting but the western countries have been gradually moving out of that and they have been saying your emissions are bigger than our emission see 250 million people emitting and one million people emitting cannot be equated because you have to take it per capita so there are several elements like that the fact that developing countries need energy and resources to move forward is one thing and secondly the developed countries have to reduce their emissions so there is some space you know there is only enough space so much space for carbon dioxide in the earth and that space has to be given to the developing countries so there are several elements in this and so climate justice has been used but Mr. Modi is the one who has given it great currency and he has talked about climate justice you know in the Mahabharata and you know he has been saying that it depends to be that remains to be seen because the quad of 2000 it was started in 2007 you know how many years it took for us to reach here and basically because India's reluctance to join in a military pact because Americans have clearly seen it as anti-Chinese pact and US Japan and Australia they're already in a pact against the Chinese you know they have a military pact so India was the only one which was not in a military pact so we played it down and the other reason is we have a land border with China you know these others can dance around in the ocean and say China has threat Chinese threat but here they are sitting on our borders so the first attack will be on us as we have seen before and therefore we were not wanting to provoke China but when the situation happened in 2020 we could help it and therefore we moved in the direction of that and then when the AUKUS was formed as a real military machinery then Quad became independent little bomb and so they will now deal with climate change with the vaccines and so on so economically also and supply chains so Quad is becoming a more so people say that the creation of AUKUS or people say AUKUS was a real betrayal you know they made another group and all that that's one view but the other view is now that the military element has been shifted to somewhere else Quad will find a role for itself as well as the the so-called Middle East Quad is concerned that is Israel, India, UAE and the US and certainly they have also created another Quad I don't know you people seem to have forgotten they have a America Afghanistan Pakistan Uzbekistan Quad also so I don't know what that logic was anyway that's also there so this is the third Quad so you can have a Quad of Quad if you're one more there'll be four Quads anyway first point is India does not want to be in a in any military alliance and so we have been dragging our feet even now we are possibly that AUKUS will take care of that but in definitely India will need that support if there is a crisis suppose China invades India totally and then we will certainly turn to Quad and ask for help and it happened during Trump's time Trump was in fact willing to take on the Chinese on the Indian border so now the president is not so keen and it depends but so OECD is a rich man's Quad and they don't have any military aspects for it except that of course they support the NATO and that and that can reach their objectives more more easily because it's a developed country's Quad and they also assist so that kind of homogeneity this group does not have and that is a reason why is it that the non-aligned group is not able to accomplish as much as OECD this is a lack of resources when the economic crisis came in 2007 and that time the only body there was was G7 G7 were the only powerful countries that are just countries in the world so they realize that unless you carry the less rich countries but more powerful in terms of resources in terms of population in terms of size must also be taken into confidence and that is how it was formed and it played a very big role and Dr. Manmohan Singh as a eminent economist played a big role in G20 and everybody conceded that G20 can accomplish more things than what the security council can do as I said because everybody is equal in that and that is how G20 was formed but its activities of course depends on as much as the members want you know the usual thing that we say when you ask about UN you see UN cannot have the power that people don't give it to them you know every member is a sovereign country unless you give power to the UN UN will have no power and similarly in G20 also so on many occasions you didn't take any action in the in 2020 at the instance of India G20 called the meeting so the Arabia was the chairman and but nothing came out of it about the about the pandemic some pledges were made but no concrete help but now G20 is focused on it what is focused on it now the United Nations will also focus on it and therefore international cooperation and that was the whole purpose of creating G20 okay thank you very much