Climate diplomacy peaked on Thursday with top leaders from Australia and France meeting Indian officials to reassure them on a host of issues. Rich countries such as the US and Australia have said a climate treaty would only be possible if India and China agree to take voluntary, but binding, emission cuts. Chetan Chauhan reports. Full coverage
Climate diplomacy peaked on Thursday with top leaders from Australia and France meeting Indian officials to reassure them on a host of issues. The end goal: an agreement at the Copenhagen summit next month.
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US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will be in Delhi on Friday for a similar climate discussion.
Rich countries such as the US and Australia have said a climate treaty would only be possible if India and China agree to take voluntary, but binding, emission cuts in the new protocol to be discussed at Copenhagen.
The US and Australia are not part of Kyoto Protocol, the existing climate treaty that expires in 2012.
India is not willing — yet — saying that under the United Nations convention, only rich countries are required to take mandatory emission cuts. India has also refused to allow its domestic mitigation measures to be open to international scrutiny as demanded by several western counties.
India has instead insisted on emission growth , as its per capita carbon emission will never exceed that of the average of rich countries. India’s per capita carbon emission is 1.2 tonne per year, less than seven times of what the US emits.
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Offering an investment of around $ 71 million (Rs 3.3 billion) in research for developing clean technologies, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said “collaboration partnership is what is needed if the nations of the world are to bring real results on climate change”.
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Offering an investment of around $ 71 million (Rs 3.3 billion) in research for developing clean technologies, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said “collaboration partnership is what is needed if the nations of the world are to bring real results on climate change”.
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Of this, $50 million (Rs 2.3 billion) will go towards the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund; $1 million (Rs 47 million) for an innovative Australia-India solar cooling research project and $20 million (Rs 934 million) for research into dry land farming in India over five years.
“An estimated 400 million Indians don’t have access to electricity, while the lack of cold storage leads to the spoilage of an estimated 20 million tonne of fruit and vegetables annually,” Rudd said.
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Rudd met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the evening. Australia has proposed a single agreement, with binding emission cuts for rich and advanced developing nations and no emission cuts for the least developed countries. India has not agreed to it.
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.
