India to decide Copenhagen accord stance in 2 weeks

India is expected to decide within a fortnight if it’ll ratify the accord reached at the last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Updated on: Jan 13, 2010, 24:10:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India is expected to decide within a fortnight if it’ll ratify the accord reached at the last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.

The cabinet will take a call on agreement before the environment ministers of the Basic countries — India, China, Brazil and South Africa — meet in Delhi on January 24 to draw strategy for year-long negotiations. A new agreement is to be signed in Mexico in December.

All the 193 countries that attended the summit have to inform the UN by January 31 if they will sign the accord.

The deal was primarily an agreement between the US, European Union and Basic countries, but the conference decided to take note of it.

Only Maldives, Canada, Australia and Papua New Guinea have responded positively, while Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia haven’t rejected it. The EU and Britain are expected to inform the UN by next week.

With most rich countries willing to go with it, pressure is mounting on India to do the same. Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh is now expected to seek the cabinet’s view on the summit outcome.

“The accord has many new elements which need the government’s approval, if we have to sign it,” said a ministry official on condition of anonymity.

Though the accord is non-binding, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wants it to be binding.

“We have agreed to the accord because it’s non-binding,” Ramesh had said at Copenhagen. Recently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said no one was satisfied with the summit outcome.

With Ban writing to the governments, India may have to rethink. The UN chief on Tuesday termed a binding treaty as important “to-do” for the world body in 2010.

There is an increasing concern that a binding accord will be the death of Kyoto Protocol, the existing climate treaty that has differentiated responsibility on climate mitigation for the rich and the developing worlds.

India had more to loss than gain from the accord, said Sunita Narian, director of Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. “There is no money or technology... But, it makes India to commit on domestic mitigation actions.” It doesn’t provide for equitable burden-sharing, the mainstay of India’s stance, she said.

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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