Unilateral and voluntary action

The minister of state for environment, Jairam Ramesh said on Monday that India would take ‘unilateral and voluntary’ set of mitigation action on climate change, without conceding to any pressure from the developed world.

In a special address at a meeting organised by Icrier in Delhi, the minister said “Copenhagen or no Copenhagen, the time has come to take mitigation action seriously, not because there is pressure, but because it is in our national interest.” He said such action could be taken in sectors such as energy, transport and manufacturing.

In December, 192 countries are meeting in Copenhagen to aim at a consensus on reducing carbon emissions global and take other actions to tackle climate change.

Ramesh said some advanced countries have very heavily weighed against commitment on the ground that unless the two largest countries by population co­mmit to act, no consensus can emerge.

“India and China are being painted as villains,” he said adding that Copenhagen should not

be taken as the end of

a process but only the

beginning.

The Financial Chronicle was among the first newspapers to urge the government to take mitigation action, not to succumb under international pressure, but because it was the right thing to do.

“India must wake up to the challenge,” Ramesh said, adding “we must take the opportunity of Copenhagen and the democles sword hanging over us to unveil a set of actions unitalerally and voluntary to convince our people that mitigation is necessary.”

He said this would be done to without compromising “our objective of 8-8.5 per cent growth and in accordance with the Singh principle—the Manmohan Singh—principle that our per capital emission will always be below the level of the developed world.” Adaptation is all very fine, he said, but it is on mitigation that India will take much bolder actions than it has so far.

Earlier, professor Mich­ael Spence, the 2001 Nobel Prize laureate in economics and Philip H Knight professor emeritus of management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, said that global consensus in action on climate change would only emerge if there is a ‘cross-border’ carbon trading action among developed and developing world.

The developed world must limit its carbon emission and trade carbon credits with the developing world whose emissions are much lower. “There need be no targets, except global ones and credits should be allocated to developing world on a per capita emission basis.”