Covid or climate change, India can't just depend on the world

Experiences with the provision of two global public goods – defence against climate change and Covid – graphically illustrate the difficulty of collective action at the international level. They also offer useful insights into complementary policy actions required at the national level to compensate for the failure of optimal action at the international level.

• The global public-good nature of defence against climate change manifests itself in the spillover of benefits of defensive actions by one country to all others: When a country cuts its carbon emissions, benefits of it in terms of reduced prospects of global warming become automatically available to all other countries.

• The cost of such action falls exclusively on the country undertaking the reduction, however. Therefore, left to itself, each country has the incentive to leave the task of emission reduction to others. The result is less than optimal reduction in emissions.

• The only way to solve this problem is through cooperation and coordinated action by all countries. This is the rationale for all but four countries to come together under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992 to come to a joint understanding of how much each country would contribute to global carbon emission reductions.

Beginning in 1997, the countries have met regularly once a year to make progress. The result has been significant yet insufficient progress towards ruling out dangerous levels of global warming. Periodically, the UN-created Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides an assessment of progress towards capping global warming. According to its latest assessment, beyond 2020, the world can add only another 500 billion metric tons of carbon to the existing stock of carbon in the atmosphere if it is to cap the increase in temperature on average at 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level.