Venture capital fund for climate research

India will get a venture capital fund to study the impact of climate change and suggest mitigation models, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jul 13, 2007, 01:13:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India will get a venture capital fund to study the impact of climate change and suggest mitigation models. Also on the agenda is a national climate change programme, the Prime Minister's Office has said.

On Friday, the government will discuss climate change threadbare with experts at the first meeting of the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change. The council, which has members like RK Pauchari, head of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Sunita Narian of Centre for Science and Environment, was formed before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh left for the G-8 meeting on climate change in Germany in the first week of June.

Environment ministry officials said a venture capital fund will be pooled from different stakeholders in the fields of agriculture, science and technology and environment.

"We will also look for contribution from the private sector that would gain from climate change mitigation methods," a ministry official said.

The fund is being created because the government feels research on climate change impact in India has been dismal. All estimates of climate change impact are based on models and lack scientific assessment, Principal Advisor in Planning Commission Surya P Sethi said recently.

Through this money the government will create a pool of scientists to do specific studies on impact of climate change in agriculture and food security, water availability, coastal regions and disaster preparedness.

"The Environment ministry and department of science and technology will select the scientists," the official said.

The PMO has also decided that by December 2007, India will have a National Climate Change Programme document enlisting what is to be done in different sectors.

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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