With relations between countries now being shaped by geo-economics rather than geo-politics, an emerging issue is to what extent the United States, China and India, all populous countries and top tier economies, see their national interest in giving a new meaning to words like “responsibility”, “development” and “growth” by shifting the focus from the twenty year old formula of burden-sharing for environmental degradation to modifying longer term trends in resource use, and developing a global vision for ‘sharing responsibility and prosperity’.

For growing economies the stress has to be on patterns of natural resource use and not on the status of natural resources; that is, dealing with the causes rather than the symptoms of the problem of climate change. The time has come for rapidly growing Asia to distinguish between the global, regional and national aspects of climate policy, recognize the linkages and shape the deliberations for the new climate regime by taking substantive measures at home.

Is climate change a sustainable development or an environmental challenge?