United Nations, Aug 2 (IANS) India has cautioned against environmental concerns becoming additional conditions on growth in developing countries and called for practical solutions to the problem of climate change.
Participating in a debate on the issue in the UN General Assembly Wednesday, India’s Permanent Representative Nirupam Sen said: “A realistic course of action on climate change has to be based on science and not on treating it as a post-modernist religion.
“A precautionary approach can be invoked in the absence of scientific certainty but environmental concerns should not become additional conditionalities on growth in developing countries,” he said.
“A scientific approach also requires us to address not just the symptoms but the cause. It is the production and consumption patterns of developed countries that created the metabolic rift through dumping ecological wastes into the atmosphere,” Sen said.
“Mahatma Gandhi had recognised the problem in the early years of the 20th century,” he said, suggesting that the world concentrates its efforts on sustainable patterns of production and consumption required for sustainable development.
Invigorated negotiations encompassing greenhouse gas mitigation at a significant level in developed countries along with their real cooperation with developing countries on adaptation and technology development and cost effective transfer can result in pragmatic, practical solutions for the benefit of all humankind, Sen said.
The present state of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is the result of over a century and a half of unabated emissions by the developed countries, which even today are at extraordinarily high levels, he noted.
“They have created an ‘irreparable rift’ in the ‘metabolic interaction’ between man and nature by appropriating the global commons and the carbon absorption capacity of the biosphere to their benefit,” Sen said.
Major polluters most certainly do not include developing countries such as India with small carbon footprints in per-capita terms.
India, with 17 percent of the world population, has only four percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Moreover, in per capita terms India’s GHG emissions of 1 tonne per year are just about a quarter of the global average of 4 tonnes per year, Sen pointed out. It was 4 percent of the per capita GHG emissions of the US, 12 percent of the EU and 15 percent of Japan, he noted.