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bne December 2021 Companies & Markets I 31
armed Turkish drones, while the populist Japarov excels at stoking tensions.
Water shortages could exacerbate the enmity. Farmers in northern Tajikistan depend on the Syr-Darya during the summer growing season. The river also powers several facilities inside Tajikistan.
Tajik media have zeroed in on Ibrayev’s comments.
“The Kyrgyz official effectively promised his neighbours to arrange a water crisis next summer because of the current acute shortage of electricity in the country,” wrote Asia-Plus on November 4.
Coal emerges down, but not out, from Glasgow
Richard Lockhart in Edinburgh
The COP26 conference finished 26 hours late on November 13, with a last-minute intervention by India watering down the final agreement’s commitment on coal.
The Indian delegate, Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, in the final hours objected to the agreement’s commitment
to “phasing out” unabated coal-fired generation, instead inserting the weaker “phasing down,” into the document.
The coal article also does not set any time limits for an end to call-fired generation.
India’s action, supported by China, was met with widespread disappointment by a number of country’s delegates, especially from developing and island nations, but the agreement was adopted unanimously, as required, at 8 pm on the evening of Saturday 13.
Critics claim the deal does not go far enough and will prove unable to limit global warming to 1.5C by the end of the century.
Conference chairman Alok Sharma spoke strongly against the intervention by China and India, while also welcoming the entry of coal into a COP agreement for the first time.
India and China will “have to explain themselves to poor nations,” he said.
Climate experts blame shrinking glaciers, decreased snowfall and increased water consumption in summer, when temperatures are higher than they used to be – all apparently irreversible impacts of climate change.
Still, Japarov is wagering his country’s future on hydropower: At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on November 2, the president promised Kyrgyzstan would stop using coal by 2050. “Renewable energy sources, especially hydropower, will be the locomotive” of Kyrgyzstan’s carbon-free future, he said.
Ayzirek Imanaliyeva is a journalist based in Bishkek. This article originally appeared on Eurasianet.
“We are on the way to consigning coal to history. This is an agreement we can build on. But in the case of China and India, they will have to explain to climate-vulnerable countries why they did what they did,” he said, the Guardian reported.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was bullish, however, saying the deal signed in Scotland “sounded the death knell for coal power.”
China’s support for India came after the phrase “phasing down of coal,” was included in the US and China’s bilateral
“We are on the way to consigning coal to history. This is an agreement we can build on”
Declaration on November 10. Beijing said in this agreement with the US that it would phase down coal consumption.
And Yadav had said earlier in the day on November 13, saying he disagreed with the language on fossil fuel subsidies and that the draft lacked balance.
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