More than 800 million people in India are bearing the burnt of climate change partly due to emissions caused by a few privileged rich people ( around 1% of the population) in the country, according to a report released by Greenpeace India Society.
The report on climate injustice, entitled ?Hiding Behind the Poor? urged the government to apply the principle of ?common but differentiated responsibilities? in the country to deal with the situation arising out of climate change.
The study authored by G Ananthapadmanabhan, K Srinivas and Vinuta Gopal, however, advocated India?s right to seek common but differentiated responsibilities at the global level.
Referring to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, the report said that India claims its right to development and thus its right to consume more energy from fossil fuels, asking developed nations to create the carbon space. Implicit in this is the notion that the developed countries need to decrease their carbon dioxide emissions drastically so that developing countries can still increase theirs without pushing the planet in the direction of climate change.?
However, the study pointed out that over the last few decades, emissions of rapidly developing countries like India and China have surged. In fact, rankings by the World Resources Institute (WRI) of top greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters has the US on top and developing countries such as China and India ranked at the second and fifth slots respectively, putting them amongst the world?s biggest emitters.
Greenpeace made an urgent plea to the government to consider the situation especially when the next round of negotiations for the second phase of Kyoto Protocol is scheduled to take place in Bali in Indonesia in December, this year.
The report further said that India was faced with two sharply contradictory realities. On the one hand there was a rapidly growing rich consumer class, which has made the country the 12th largest luxury market in the world and on the other hand India has become the home to more than 800 million poor people on the planet who are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. India?s per capita carbon dioxide emission has averaged to 1.67 tonne.