India’s climate change roadmap to be ready in June
INDIA: India will unveil in June a national plan to deal with the
threat of global warming, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on
Thursday, but it will not commit to any emission targets that risk
slowing economic growth.
Singh’s Council on Climate Change will look at setting up a venture
capital fund to promote green technologies, increasing energy efficiency
and combating the possible impact of climate change on millions of
India’s poor.
“India is prepared to commit that our per-capita carbon emissions
will never exceed the average per-capita emissions of developed
industrial economies,” Singh told a summit on sustainable development in
New Delhi.
Those emission levels could be brought down further as and when the
worst emitters in the developed world cut back on their emissions, he
said.
India, whose economy has grown by 8-9 percent annually in recent
years, is one of the world’s top polluters and contributes around 4
percent of global greenhouse gas emissions as its consumption of fossil
fuels gathers pace.
But as a developing nation, India is not yet required to cut
emissionssaid to be rising by between 2 and 3 percent a year under the
Kyoto Protocol, despite mounting pressure from environmental groups and
industrialised nations.
In December, world nations including India and top polluters China
and the United States agreed to launch two years of talks on a broader
global pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions to replace Kyoto once that
pact expires at the end of 2012.
Kyoto binds 37 rich nations to curb emissions during the pact’s first
commitment period of 2008-2012.
New DelhI, Thursday, Reuters |