‘Copenhagen deal will open Pandora’s box’

India’s consent to the final accord on climate hammered out at the Copenhagen meet goes against the assurance Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had given Parliament before his departure, said CPM leader Sitaram Yechury, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Dec 21, 2009, 01:28:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s consent to the final accord on climate hammered out at the Copenhagen meet goes against the assurance Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had given Parliament before his departure, said CPM leader Sitaram Yechury.

Yechury, who was part of the delegation to the climate summit, told Hindustan Times in an exclusive interview that the clause relating to ‘consultation and analysis’ of domestic action by countries to mitigate climate change — including action that was voluntarily undertaken, without international funding — went against Ramesh’s statement in Parliament that India would provide such information only to the United Nations.

“It amounts to intrusion into a country’s privacy,” he said. “Nobody is clear as to what ‘consultation and analysis’ actually mean. It will open a Pandora’s box.”

He also maintained the Copenhagen deal was unfair to the poor countries of the world. “The accord does not take the world anywhere,” Yechury said.

The interests of 80 per cent of the world’s population, who are most vulnerable to climate change, have been compromised.”

Most poor countries, he noted, wanted a maximum temperature rise to be fixed at 1.5 degrees C above pre industrial levels. However, the Copenhagen accord settled on 2 degrees, while, in the opinion of experts, temperatures could even rise by 3 degrees C given the weak mitigation efforts agreed on.

“Poor countries also wanted developed nations to reduce their emissions by 35 to 40 per cent of 1990 levels,” he said. “Instead the accord seeks only 20-25 per cent.”

The CPI(M) also on Sunday termed the Copenhagen Accord as “weak and deeply ambigious”, which had no legal binding to commit the industrialised nations for emission cuts.

“The leaders who gathered in Copenhagen have failed their people by not delivering an effective and equitable climate change agreement.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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