NEW DELHI: India has withdrawn its proposal to host the 33rd edition of the Conference of Parties (COP33) climate summit, which is scheduled for 2028.
Rajat Agrawal, a joint secretary at the the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, informed the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) about India’s decision.
Agrawal, who has the responsibility of liaising with the UN body, conveyed the decision to the chair of the Asia-Pacific Group of the organisation in a letter sent on April 2.
Spokesperson of the ministry Virat Majboor confirmed to this newspaper that India had indeed communicated its decision to the UNFCCC secretariat. “This has been officially communicated to the concerned parties, but no further details are available,” he said.
Unconfirmed reports state that India told the chair of the Asia-Pacific group that the decision was based on the “review of its commitments for 2028”.
During COP28 in Dubai in 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that India wished to host COP33.
This initiative had the support of the BRICS group, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
With this withdrawal, climate experts consider it a lost opportunity for India to showcase its significant achievements on a global stage. They argue that the conference could have been a platform for India to demand accountability for historical emissions and to ensure that the transition to a green economy does not come at the expense of energy access for the world’s most vulnerable populations.
“By stepping back, New Delhi also loses a critical platform to champion the Global South,” remarked climate activist Harjeet Singh.
Earlier, a London-based environmental news agency reported that it had verified the Indian government’s four-paragraph letter regarding its withdrawal from hosting CoP33 in 2028. The details of this letter have not yet become public.
The annual Conference of Parties (CoP) meeting serve as assessment and future course of action of global community on climate change. The CoP33 in 2028 would carry out Global Stocktake(GST) of climate actions on the Paris Agreement target to keep ruse in temperature within 1.5 deg C to 2 deg C. The organiser country get greater scrutiny of their performance.