IPCC ’07 report kept Govt in dark

The Indian government had in 2007 approved the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the Himalayan glaciers that failed to mention that most glaciers would vanish by 2035. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jan 20, 2010, 24:47:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Indian government had in 2007 approved the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the Himalayan glaciers that failed to mention that most glaciers would vanish by 2035.

“The policy document circulated by IPCC only said that Himalayan glaciers were melting at a fast rate,” said Pradipto Ghosh, who was then secretary in the Ministry of Environment and Forests. “There was no mention of the 2035 figure”.

IPCC chief R.K. Pachauri had said that respective countries validate all its reports before they are released. “The IPCC reports pass through a robust process involving all the countries,” Pachauri had said.

That was not the case with regard to Himalayan glaciers.

“I don’t want to get into what happened in the past,” Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh said. “I know IPCC’s claim on glaciers were not based on facts.”

Hindustan Times has found that the UN’s climate body had used data from another glacier study by Indian glaciologist A.K. Naithani, who was in 1999 with the department of geology in Garhwal University in Uttarakhand to reach the conclusion that the Himalayan glaciers would shrink from 500,000 sq km to 100,000 sq km by 2035.

The IPCC, however, did not mention the source of the data on he retreat of nine glaciers but HT tracked it to Naithani and found the figures much higher than those now claimed by the central government.

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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