World | India
Climate change plan by June, says Singh
India will unveil in June a national plan to deal with the threat of global warming, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday, but it will not commit to any emission targets that risk slowing economic growth.
- Reuters
- Published: 01:04 February 8, 2008
- Chairman of the United Nations' Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachauri (right) speaks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the opening ceremony of the annual three-day Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2008 in New Delhi.
- Image Credit: Reuters
New Delhi: India will unveil in June a national plan to deal with the threat of global warming, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday, 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 per cent annually in recent years, is one of the world's top polluters and contributes about 4 per cent 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 emissions - said to be rising by between 2 and 3 per cent 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 US, 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.
Just a fraction
Kyoto binds 37 rich nations to curb emissions during the pact's first commitment period of 2008-2012. Developing nations are excluded.
According to UN data, India's per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, were 1.2 tonnes in 2004, compared with 20.6 tonnes for the United States for the same year.
Officials said the new national plan will not include any overall emissions targets. India says it must use more energy to lift its population from poverty and that its per-capita emissions are a fraction of those in rich nations.
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