Move over bilateral trade, climate change is here to warm up Sino-Indian relation.

And if it really does, the lion’s chare of the credit must go to Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. The flamboyant and controversy-courting politician has taken riveting risks to win Chinese confidence. His recent comments in Beijing that caused brouhaha in India are the latest example.

While in the Chinese capital last week, no sooner he said India “should take a much more relaxed approach to Chinese investments and remove needless restrictions,” phones at the Indian Prime Minister’s Office were burning with calls from the Home Ministry in New Delhi.

Indian newspapers reported he was reprimanded by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and that he also had to meet Home Minister P Chidambaram for damage control.

Ramesh was in Beijing for a climate change meet where he became nostalgic about last year’s Copenhagen summit that showcased an unusual Indian-Chinese alliance.

“He said there was danger that cooperation with China flowing from Copenhagen spirit would end unless New Delhi changed ‘a needlessly restrictive, alarmist approach’ to Chinese investment in infrastructure,” Indo Asian News Service reported.

Even before Copenhagen, the two Asian giants had developed a level of intimacy by holding a series of meetings in the run up to the global summit. Quite strategically, they then formed the new emerging boys’ club — BASIC — getting Brazil and South Africa on-board.

It was this very gang-of-four that — out of the blue and out of the United Nations climate negotiation framework — had backed US President Barrack Obama’s blueprint of what was to be the controversial Copenhagen accord.

Not just during secret negotiations at venues out of bounds for the media, the peculiar partnership was in display even in the open. In an interaction with journalists in Copenhagen, I saw for myself how key Indian and Chinese negotiators were coordinating and complementing each other to corner a European Union representative.

Post-Copenhagen, the bond continued with both Beijing and New Delhi bizarrely expressing conditional support for the Copenhagen accord they themselves had so fervently pushed.

The two dancing arm in arm like that may offer some hope for a shift in geopolitical dynamics in the region, particularly in countries like Nepal where they compete for influence.

If optimists have a point in pointing at trade and commerce to bridge the gap between the two emerging economies, there is no reason why we should not pin our hopes on climate change to bring them together.

Perhaps that is what Indian Minister Jairam Ramesh’s mantra is.

And his recent overture in Beijing did pay off immediately, at least in the Chinese media.

“The remarks by Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh seem prudent,” China Daily wrote in its editorial titled “Look beyond trade.”

“The Indian side should view its trade ties with China from the broader perspective of Sino-Indian friendship and make concrete efforts to root out obstacles in the way of bilateral trade.”

Towards that end, climate change certainly appears to be changing things between the two fast developing nations.

But will that do any good to the climate itself? As things stand now, it’s a big NO.

Just dig into the past global climate negotiations and you will know what brought the two together. In all of these UN-coordinated meets, China and India have stuck to the Kyoto-track — one of the two negotiation processes in the world body’s climate regime.

The reason why they are glued to this particular track is the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 that requires developed countries to mandatorily cut their carbon emissions while emerging economies like China and India are exempted.

Rich countries have been arguing that Kyoto is irrelevant now because fast developing nations’ emissions have risen significantly and therefore they too should have binding carbon reduction targets.

China and India’s rebuttal is that developed countries have historic responsibility for the dangerous concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

They insist that developing countries like them should be allowed to develop and that will not be possible if they are made to cut down carbon emissions.

While Beijing and New Delhi have stuck to their common gun, Washington DC, that leads developed worlds in climate negotiations, has not budged from its stand either. Trying to get rid of Kyoto from the UN negotiation framework apart, the US has also resorted to delaying tactics. Its first ever climate bill that was passed by the House of Representatives is now stuck in the Senate.

All this, while the world continues to pump around 47 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year.

If we are to avoid temperature rise of more than two degree Celsius from pre-industrial level, scientists say, emissions must peak and begin to decline by 2020 and then drop to around 35 billion tonnes by 2030.

Globally, we have not even begun to move toward that target while the regional story is even grimmer.

In their quest to develop as quickly as possible, China and India not only are dangerously adding greenhouse gases in the atmosphere but they are also major contributors to the atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs).

These masses of haze are mainly made up of black carbon, a product of incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and burning of biomass. 

A recent USAID report on black carbon in Asia has said, “The South Asian ABC has important regional climate impacts in Asia causing changes in the hydrological cycle and in monsoon circulation that negatively impact food production in India and China.”

So what?

As long as climate change warms up the relation of the two Asian giants.

(The writer is a BBC journalist based in London)

navin.khadka@gmail.com

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