India to launch national black carbon programme

India will launch a national programme on black carbon on December 15. Environment minister Jairam Ramesh said the programme will cover measurement, monitoring and modeling for black carbon but ruled out India agreeing for inclusion of black carbon into the framework of UN climate talks. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Dec 8, 2010, 08:00:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Cancun

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India will launch a national programme on black carbon on December 15. Environment minister Jairam Ramesh said the programme will cover measurement, monitoring and modeling for black carbon but ruled out India agreeing for inclusion of black carbon into the framework of UN climate talks.

"Our position on the issue is clear. We are starting the programme on black carbon as it is a health issue more than environment issue for us," he told reporters on Tuesday.

The Indian black carbon project will be a joint venture of India and foreign scientists and it will also recommend measures to reduce black carbon emissions, whose primarily source is kerosene stoves.

India has also thwarted the move of United States and European Union to move hydroflourocarbons (HFCs) out of Kyoto Protocol and into the Montreal Protocol, which governs ozone-depleting substances.

The HFC, a climate change causing gas, is a by-product of ozone depleting substance. The move would have hit five Indian companies, who own half of the world's carbon credits earned by reducing HFC emissions and have earned over US $ 300 million dollars so far. "HFC is a green house gas and it should remain so," Ramesh said, after meeting US and European negotiators on the issue.

An Indian official said that the US was presented with a set of 32 questions against the move, which they failed to reply.

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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