By NNN-PTI
New York : India and China need to chart a different path to develop low carbon economies to combat global warming, Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra K Pachauri said.
“In per capita terms, India and China are way below the US and North America. But a quite apart from that, China and India have to chart a new path. The developed country experience has proved disastrous for variety of other reasons energy security for one thing, local pollution another,” Pachauri, said in an interview to a news magazine.
In both India and China, there is now a serious debate. “In India I can see it for sure because the prime minister is quite concerned about this issue. He set up the advisory council on climate change,” he said.
“Similarly in China, there’s a China council for international cooperation on the environment and development, of which I am a member. There’s now a serious effort to look at a low carbon economy in China,” Pachauri said in an interview being published in Newsweek.
Pachauri, under whose leadership IPCC jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore, said he is “very optimistic” that world is ready to tackle the climate change because of awareness has increased in the last eight or nine months ever since Panel’s reports have started coming out.
He did not endorse the view that the United States administration is still a laggard and said, “I would say there is clearly a very detectable shift on the part of this administration…. Irrespective who’s in the White House, I think the next administration will have to be far more proactive on climate change than we have seen so far.”