India to seek more funds from rich nations at climate talks

With 2015 heading towards being the hottest year on record, India and China will negotiate for a treaty to put a check on the rising temperature.

Updated on: Jun 1, 2015, 01:20:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

With 2015 heading towards being the hottest year on record, India and China will negotiate for a treaty to put a check on the rising temperature.

According-to-World-Meteorological-Organisation-2015-could-be-the-warmest-year-on-record-HT-photo

The two countries will formally move a proposal at the Bonn climate talks starting from Monday, proposing that rich nations should have pre-2020 emission reduction targets. India will also propose that rich nations give US$ 100 billion of public finance every year to fight climate change.

An 89-page draft was agreed on in Geneva earlier this year for the Paris climate summit and at Bonn, negotiators of 196 countries will try to bridge differences on several contentious issues, including finance, mitigation targets, adaptation and technology transfer.

An Indian climate negotiator said the task at Bonn would not be easy as most of the countries were not willing to budge from their stand. He added that as the Prime Minister had made it clear, India would be insisting on pre-2020 emission targets as part of the deal.

“Having post-2020 emission reduction targets has no meaning unless rich countries have emission reduction targets for 2020. Many countries have opted out of the Kyoto Protocol making it a non-effective instrument,” the official said.

The proposal is backed by China and a few other developing countries but may be resisted by the United States which has not given any emission reduction target for 2020.

The negotiations come at the time when several tropical countries, including India and Africa, are battling an intense heat wave.

The Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation that monitors global weather conditions had predicted that 2015 could be the warmest year on record. The prediction is based on the hot weather conditions in various regions of the world in the first five months of 2015.

Climate scientists believe that the weather condition this year should be a warning to countries that they need to act now to fight climate change.

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

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.