PM to meet environment ministers on Jan 23

With pressure mounting on India to sign the Copenhagen Accord, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to meet environment ministers from China, Brazil and South Africa — which, along with India, form the Basic countries — on January 23 to discuss the issue.

Updated on: Jan 14, 2010, 24:36:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With pressure mounting on India to sign the Copenhagen Accord, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to meet environment ministers from China, Brazil and South Africa — which, along with India, form the Basic countries — on January 23 to discuss the issue.

The decision was taken after Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh met the PM on Wednesday.

The Copenhagen Accord has to be signed by January 31.

The ministers of the Basic countries will be holding consultations in New Delhi on January 24 for a joint strategy on climate negotiations in 2010. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had asked countries to sign a binding legal treaty on climate change by the year-end.

Ramesh had said earlier this month that there was increasing pressure on India from the developing nations, including Bangladesh and the Maldives, to sign the Copenhagen Accord.

“The US president kept on saying to the head of state of Bangladesh and the Maldives that ‘you are not going to get money (for climate steps) unless these four guys (BASIC nations) sign the accord’,” Ramesh said.

According to the Copenhagen Accord, rich countries have committed to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing nations for climate mitigation and adaptation.

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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