India, US on same page on climate talks

Europe may find itself isolated at a meeting of Major Economies Forum in Washington this week with India and United States being on the same page on opposing the legally binding climate treaty.

Updated on: Nov 17, 2011, 24:33:21 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Europe may find itself isolated at a meeting of Major Economies Forum in Washington this week with India and United States being on the same page on opposing the legally binding climate treaty.

The forum will be discussing the future of the existing climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, and the ambit of the proposed new climate treaty under long term cooperative action to fight climate change.

The European Union has sought that the second commitment period of the protocol, starting from 2013, should have legally binding emission reduction targets for all nations, which India and United States have opposed.

The EU has proposed that after 2020 there should be a mandatory emission reduction targets for all countries including developing nations such as India and China. Between 2013 and 2020, the countries will have to commit on their voluntary climate change actions without any conditions.

India has declared to reduce its emission intensity by 20-25% of its 2005 levels by 2020 with a condition that rich nations would provide money and transfer clean technology to meet the target. So far, rich nations have been dithering on funding the clean technology transfer mechanism and providing finance to the developed world to fight climate change.

But China has taken a slightly different line by agreeing to make its voluntary action of checking growth of its emissions as a binding requirement under the climate change treaty.

“India and China are not comparable,” said a senior environment ministry official. “China’s emissions are five times more than that of India and economically also they are much ahead”.

But, India has found some support from the United States, which believes that a pledge to reduce emissions is a commitment and it should not be backed through a legal instrument.

Climate experts, however, say the issue of legally binding climate treaty would be a thorny issue at the meeting of 17 most powerful economies in the world in Washington. They also claim that the European Union has been shifting its goalpost on supporting the second commitment period for Kyoto Protocol, which could be a major reason for the failure of climate talks in Durban, South Africa, later this month.

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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