By Neena Bhandari, IANS
Sydney : India and Australia must urgently work towards a closer relationship on development issues to have greater global appeal, said the head of the world’s leading climate change organisation.
The chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, was delivering the 11th K.R. Narayanan Memorial lecture Wednesday in Canberra on “Coping with Climate Change: Is Development in India and the World Sustainable?”
He called upon Australia to “seize this opportunity for reassessing its position and act resolutely on the basis of the scientific evidence and actual observations to chart out a new path of development.”
Pachauri said: “Given the rapid growth of the Indian economy, urgent shifts towards a sustainable path of development are essential. What is good for India would also be good for the world, and it is in realization of this fact that India has to emerge as a model that other nations would like to emulate.”
“By establishing a benchmark India would also gain economic advantage, since the processes, technologies and products that it develops for attaining a sustainable path of development would provide a competitive advantage that would open markets globally for Indian suppliers who would access opportunities overseas,” he added.
Emphasising that the world has to implement the reduction of emissions with some sense of urgency, Pachauri said it was also essential to address “the equity aspects of this threatening problem. The largest responsibility for increase in concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere lies with the developed countries, but the worst impacts and the highest vulnerability applies to several developing countries.”
Projected sea level rises will make the Asian mega-deltas, including populated cities of Dhaka, Kolkata and Shanghai, most vulnerable to coastal flooding and other serious consequences, affecting a large number of people and property.
Pointing out that the international community had provided hardly any resources for adaptation measures in the most vulnerable countries, he said: “A country like India, therefore, has not only to raise its voice on the inequitable nature of actions and responses to climate change between the developed and developing countries, but also ensure that in its own path of development it pursues the objectives of sustainability.”
He drew attention to how vulnerable India was to the impacts of climate change and its economic implications. Frequent floods and droughts would have serious impact on food security. Melting of Himalayan glaciers could reduce the flow of rivers in northern India, adversely affecting irrigation and recharge of groundwater in the region.
Earlier, Pachauri had met government officials in the national capital and backed the John Howard government’s decision, which has come under widespread criticism, to defer setting a long-term target for reducing greenhouse emissions.
He told The Australian newspaper that it was critical that policies to address climate change be rolled out only after informed debates based on rational thinking and rigorous analysis of the impact of different options.
“Otherwise one might come up with a lot of emotional and political responses that may or may not be the best. I think in a democracy it’s important to see there is an informed debate in officialdom as well as in the public,” Pachauri told the national daily.
Pachauri is speaking on the same topic at the Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment at the University of New South Wales here Thursday and delivering the Asia Link lecture in Melbourne Friday on “New Knowledge on Climate Change – New Imperatives for Action”.