India calls for assistance to combat climate change

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Oz urged for climate change agreementBring down per capita emissions, India to West'Impacts of climate change would be serious'

New Delhi, December 10: India has pleaded for financial assistances to developing countries for equipping them to develop capacities to become climate resilient.

The Indian science and technology minister, Kapil Sibal while speaking at the 13th conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in Bali in Indonesia said : “Developing countries must equip themselves to develop capacities to become climate resilient. For this, we require technology solutions and financial resources at an accelerated rate to cope with and adapt to the inevitability of increased global warming in the coming decades.”

He said that estimates of adaptation costs for developing countries ran into several tens of billions of US dollars on an annual basis.

“I hope that there is clear recognition by all concerned that these have to be met through new and additional monies and not by re-appropriation of funds meant for development. Resource mobilization of this magnitude requires that we tap all possible sources, including the carbon market and make full use of the potential from all the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms,” he said.

Sibal said that the intellectual property rights (IPRs) regime must balance rewards for innovators with the common good of humankind. Standards and norms must reflect the development levels of where they are being deployed, he said and called for technology transfer at cheaper rates.

He complimented the Bali agenda for bringing technology transfer for implementation. “Mere discussion is not enough. We need to reach decisions. Absence of decisions only reinforces the perception that there is lack of will on the part of the developed countries to fulfill their commitments. We need to reach consensus on technology transfer and capacity-building – two issues that are really central to the global response to climate change,” he said.

He said that negotiations under the Kyoto Protocol for quantified, time bound and substantial GHG reductions by developed countries post 2012 should be completed by 2009.

Sibal retreated Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh’s offer at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm that India's per capita GHG emissions would at no stage exceed the per capita GHG emissions of developed countries even as we pursue our economic development. India would be launching world’s largest afforestation project covering six million hectare of degraded forest land at an investment of over $ 1.5 billion, he said.