Indian PM sets up council on climate change

One World South Asia, via Infochange: While India continues to sticks to its traditional stand of refusing to accept quantitative targets on reducing carbon-emitting greenhouse gas use, the government is slowly coming around to the idea that an agreement on reductions could be conditional on explicit subsidies on clean technologies from the developed world

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has formed a high-level advisory panel to formulate the country’s strategy on climate change and its fallout. The panel, announced on June 6, World Environment Day and just prior to G8 talks on climate change, comprises government ministers as well as climate experts and industry representatives.

An official release stated that the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change “will coordinate national action plans for the assessment, adaptation and mitigation of climate change. It will advise the government on proactive measures that can be taken by India to deal with climate change.” And it will facilitate inter-ministerial coordination, and guide policy in relevant areas…

...The panel is a follow-up to a review conducted by the prime minister in May where the consensus was that India ought to have a domestic policy on climate change. Ministers present at the meeting felt that India needed a national policy to tackle climate change, even if it did not soften its international stance that traditional global polluters, ie, the developed world, ought to make more effort to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions instead of making demands of developing countries, whose chief imperative was cutting poverty levels.

The meeting also concluded that India must initiate measures to cut its carbon emissions despite the fact that it was not yet a major polluter and could not compromise on economic growth and poverty reduction targets. This view may have been a response to recent UN reports warning of catastrophic consequences for India, especially its poor, as a result of climate change-related disasters.

While the fear was expressed that formulating a climate change strategy would mean a rollback in India’s refusal to commit to emission cutbacks at forthcoming climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia, this fear has proven unfounded.

The setting up of the panel is also thought to be a response to consistent demands that both India and China -- likely to be the world’s largest polluters in the future -- commit to major cuts in carbon emissions. However, India and other developing nations contend that the developed world must subsidise clean technologies in order to allow the former to make the switch to less-polluting energy sources without compromising on economic growth.

So, while India sticks to its traditional stand of refusing to accept quantitative targets on reducing carbon-emitting greenhouse gas use, the government is slowly coming around to the idea that an agreement on reductions could be conditional on explicit subsidies on clean technologies from the developed world.