When I played my role in the policy exercise as a representative of India, I felt like we needed help since we were still a somewhat developing country and at first we were not getting the help we needed. I think the other groups didn’t understand that we needed help because we weren’t under the “Developing Countries” category.
When we started negotiating with other countries, I think they started to realize that even though we are not under that category, we still need help. We have so many people in our country and this contributes to our country’s carbon emissions and the other countries started to realize that our emissions were from our high population not necessarily each individual using an extreme amount.
After negotiations, our group was able to get money from China and the US, which was great considering the US was only going to give $17 at first. I think these other countries and ourselves realized after we played with the numbers on the chart that deforestation and afforestation aren’t going to do much and that its actually the rates that will affect the temperature. I think after these richer countries saw that they came to the conclusion that they need to help the more developing countries so that we have the resources to make this possible.
In the end, I think that we can cut emissions, but I don’t think it will be feasible in the next couple decades to cut it to the goal we had of only 2 degrees. Cutting emissions this dramatically would impact people’s every day lives and change their lifestyle.
Mentioned before, I think one of the major cost barriers was that at first the US was not giving any many, when India and the developing countries requested $230 billion combined and initially, there was a little over $100 billion. Eventually, the US contributed but not nearly as much as they should have.
I think we can catalyze change in the US by reducing our emissions now gradually and then we will adapt to it, and hopefully this will steadily decrease emissions over the years.