Jairam Ramesh in Cancun with mandate to align with US

India’s main challenge at the Cancun climate summit is to try and bring the US — the world’s second largest carbon emitter — on board with the emerging economies in tackling climate change. Chetan Chauhan reports. Exclusive interview: Jairam Ramesh

Updated on: Dec 4, 2010, 02:25:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s main challenge at the Cancun climate summit is to try and bring the US — the world’s second largest carbon emitter — on board with the emerging economies in tackling climate change. And to do this, it is willing to open itself up to international verification of its domestic mitigation measures.

Before leaving for Mexico, environment minister Jairam Ramesh told HT his mandate was to “play a bridge” between the US and the others. He said any climate deal without the US on board would not be worth it and exhorted America to improve its offer of a 14% emission reduction target by 2020.

India will also allow verification of its domestic mitigation pledge — which is to reduce emission intensity for a unit of GDP by 20-25% by 2010 — a big deviation from its stand at the 2009 Copenhagen summit.

Ramesh has a a proposal that experts say has enough to appease US climate negotiators. “I have proposed that for all countries that have emissions equivalent to or more than 1% of the global average and that are also major emitters, the frequency of measurement, review and verification (MRV) should be once in three years and for others, once in six years," he said. India and China’s emissions are more than 1%.

His second proposal, he said, was on tech transfer from rich to poor nations. “Unless technology transfer takes place,
we won’t agree on an MRV regime,” he said.

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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