By Sangeeta Godbole

The BRICS climate agenda on unilateral trade and climate measures must develop credible cooperative alternatives in areas like carbon accounting where the need is urgent. Trade and climate policy are deeply intertwined and directly affect industry in BRICS countries. On a closer look at the climate related paragraphs, the 2026 Declaration shows substantial repetition of texts of BRICS Rio Summit Declaration 2025, alongside the disappearance of some of the key elements of the previous year’s agenda such as carbon accounting.

The climate section, particularly paragraphs 107–112, restates familiar positions on the UNFCCC, Paris Agreement, CBDR-RC, climate finance, unilateral climate measures, biodiversity and forests. Since BRICS issues a leaders’ declaration every year, repeating them at length risks lesser focus on action points. Unilateral climate-related trade measures (para 108), however, could have done with more emphasis. The parallel Para 88 of the 2025 Rio Summit declaration explicitly identified “deforestation regulation, due diligence requirements, taxes and other measures” as unilateral and discriminatory measures of concern.

Protectionist measures

It opposed protectionist measures that ‘deliberately disrupt global supply and production chains and distort competition’. The EU’s deforestation regulation is due to apply from December 30, 2026 to large and medium operators, with later application to smaller operators. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, following its 2026 simplification, is scheduled to apply from July 2029, with reporting requirements and remedial action reaching deep into value chains.

However, paragraph 110 brings in fresh perspectives and agendas. The Declaration welcomes knowledge-sharing through a ‘High-level Dialogue on People-Centric Community-based Adaptation Approaches’, and a dialogue on aligning carbon markets with adaptation goals. More significantly, paragraph 110 recognises traditional knowledge systems, indigenous and local practices, local innovation and community experience, and welcomes the ‘BRICS Principles for advancing Climate Resilience through People-Centric and Community-based Adaptation based on Traditional Knowledge’.

Several BRICS members — notably Brazil, India and China — possess deep reservoirs of traditional knowledge and living community practices. With adaptation becoming increasingly urgent and critical in the fight against climate change, this approach connects climate adaptation to knowledge and practices that already exist within developing societies’.

For BRICS and partner countries, these measures will create substantial demands for traceability, documentation, data, verification and supply-chain due diligence if firms are to retain access to the European market. Their omission from the 2026 Declaration ignores precisely the trade measures that are likely to become increasingly consequential. BRICS must raise these yet-to-be operationalised measures in COP 31, to assess them from a climate perspective.

Carbon accounting, missing entirely from the 2026 Declaration, lies at the heart of the emerging trade climate problem. The 2025 Rio Declaration encouraged ‘mutually recognised methodologies and standards for assessing greenhouse-gas emissions’ and welcomed the “BRICS Principles for Fair, Inclusive and Transparent Carbon Accounting in Product and Facility Footprints.” It envisaged further work to contextualise the principles by sector and for all greenhouse gases and to explore their potential to support carbon-accounting policy frameworks.

Different jurisdictions are developing different methodologies for determining embodied emissions. The result can be a fragmented carbon-accounting landscape in which the same product carries different carbon values depending on the importing market. For developing countries pursuing rapid industrialisation, this is particularly problematic.

Cap-and-trade systems

Cap-and-trade systems designed around the scarcity of emissions allowances in developed economies cannot simply be transplanted into economies whose overriding challenge is expanding production while lowering emissions intensity. Nor can one assume that developed-country systems will readily recognise the emissions reductions achieved through baseline-and-credit or intensity-based mechanisms such as India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme. India’s experience is already instructive. The UK has recognised India’s CCTS as a qualifying carbon-pricing scheme for its CBAM. To obtain carbon-price relief, the system requires evidence that the embodied emissions were subject to the qualifying scheme and an independently verified carbon-pricing verification form.

The exporter therefore still confronts questions of system boundaries, emissions data, verification, precursor emissions, calculations and the treatment of missing information. These requirements can impose disproportionate costs on smaller firms and supply-chain participants. CBAM is now set to explode with the EU Parliament approving addition of 180 more CN (combined nomenclature) codes in iron and steel and aluminium products. Added to this, over 200 CN codes in other areas will also potentially be covered by CBAM. This could exponentially increase the CBAM risk faced by Indian exporters to EU from 2028.

A common methodology that can mutually recognise and establish equivalences in carbon pricing, while respecting the Paris Agreement pillars, would create a strong tool for global cooperation in emissions reduction effort.

Sangeeta Godbole is former IRS. She researches and teaches the intersection of Trade and Environment.

The Hindu Business Line