Muskan Bhatia,
New Delhi, 11 Dec (UNI) Climate talks usually crawl along, but every now and then a bit of quiet shoulder-nudging can jolt the global conversation. That was the mood at a Post-COP dialogue in Delhi on Wednesday, where Indian officials and climate experts said years of low-key diplomacy have finally pushed the world to acknowledge an issue India has been warning about for nearly a decade: climate policies being used as unfair trade barriers.
The event, jointly organised by the Chintan Research Foundation (CRF) and TERI at the India Habitat Centre, brought together senior policymakers, climate negotiators, and researchers to unpack the outcomes of the recently concluded COP30 in Belem. While the panel addressed topics ranging from finance and adaptation to just transitions, it was India’s stance on unilateral trade measures that quickly set the tone.
Picking up that thread, Leena Nandan, former Secretary at the Environment Ministry, noted that India had first flagged this concern back in 2015, in its submission of national climate targets ahead of the Paris Agreement. “At that time, we clearly stated that unilateral trade barriers in the name of climate action would not be acceptable,” she said. For years, she added, the warning was largely brushed aside by developed countries, even as proposals like the EU’s carbon border tax gained momentum.
“But India continued to work quietly,” she said. “Last year in Baku, we mobilised several developing-country groups to highlight this concern. And now, for the first time, the COP declaration recognises the need for a dialogue on trade and climate change. That is a major shift.”
India’s lead negotiator, Ruchika Drall, Deputy Secretary, MOEFCC, agreed. Although India did not manage to place unilateral trade measures formally on the COP agenda, she said, “the fact that it is now written into the final decision text means the issue is alive, and we have a platform to discuss how such measures hurt industries in developing countries.”
As the discussion at the India Habitat Centre moved beyond trade, speakers homed in on another major outcome of COP30: the rising global focus on adaptation. With extreme heat, floods and storms becoming more frequent, several panellists said the world is finally recognising that adapting to climate impacts is as urgent as cutting emissions.
Nandan called adaptation a central pillar of the Belem outcome, a shift she said closely reflects the priorities of developing countries. She also pointed to growing attention on carbon removal, the effort to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through natural or technological means, arguing that this opens new doors for Indian researchers and startups working on innovative solutions.
Taking the conversation deeper, Ajay Mathur, Professor at IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy, said countries now have a list of adaptation indicators they can draw from to track progress. But to make them meaningful, he argued, India must create a national system that helps identify which indicators matter most for different regions. “You don’t need to report everything,” he said. “You report what is relevant. That is the spirit of the bottom-up approach.”
At this point, Mathur also sounded a warning: climate negotiations are in danger of losing their sense of urgency. With fewer informal chats between negotiators, “the kind that happen over a cup of coffee,” he joked, it is becoming harder for countries to understand one another’s concerns. The global climate process, he suggested, may require more continuous, year-round discussions rather than two short annual meetings.
Even as speakers welcomed the new adaptation indicators, others urged caution. The Belem adaptation indicators, noted Suruchi Bhadwal, Programme Director at TERI, create a monitoring and reporting framework, but are not tools that directly drive action. “They can feed into the global stocktake, but they will not help countries address adaptation,” she said. “It supports reporting, not implementation.”
Her expectations for COP30 had been modest, but she believes the world remains far from giving adaptation the political weight it deserves. “Adaptation was meant to have the same visibility as mitigation,” she said. “We are still nowhere close.”
Bhadwal further contended that the Global Goal on Adaptation should have included global indicators—metrics on food security, health security, and infrastructure resilience—that the world could collectively track. “Will the world have enough food to feed its population? That should have been a global indicator,” she said. “These are concerns we must address together as humanity.”
Bringing the discussion back to Delhi, Bhadwal emphasised that lessons from global negotiations apply locally too. “Solutions exist,” she said. “But we need coordination, consistency and the will to act every day, not just on the worst days.”
