By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
New Delhi : Heads of five governments will join India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he opens here Thursday the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS) that has climate change as its theme.
Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Finland Prime Minister Matti Vanhenen are the heads of government expected at the summit.
Four former heads of government, 10 ministers, four former ministers, two Nobel laureates, top officials from various multilateral and bilateral agencies and a host of corporate leaders will also attend the summit.
Hosted by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), DSDS will be the first major international meet on climate change after the UN summit in Bali, Indonesia, last December. TERI is headed by R.K. Pachauri, who also chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that came out with its seminal fourth assessment report last year and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.
The summit assumes added significance as India is stoutly resisting pressure from the industrialised world to commit to cutting down its own greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The leaders will discuss climate change in a situation where GHG emissions into the atmosphere are already affecting agricultural output, increasing frequency and damage caused by droughts, floods and storms and raising sea levels across the world, but mainly in the tropics and sub-tropics.
They will be joined by Massoumeh Ebtekar, former vice president of Iran, Moritz Leuenberger, former president of Switzerland, Ruud F.M. Lubbers, former prime minister of The Netherlands, and Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico.
Environment ministers who will attend the DSDS are Anil Kumar Bachoo of Mauritius, Aïcha Mint Sidi Bouna of Mauritania, Sayed Wajid Hussain Bukhari of Pakistan, Andreas Carlgren of Sweden, Maciej Nowicki of Poland, Maria Cristina Narbona Ruiz of Spain and Kimmo Yiilikainen of Finland. They will be joined by Dasho Paljor J. Dorji, Advisor to Bhutan’s National Environment Commission, Connie Hedegaard, minister for climate change and energy in Denmark, and Khempheng Pholsena, minister for water resources in Laos.
F. Sherwood of the University of California and Carlo Rubbia of the European research agency CERN are the two Nobel laureates expected.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of India’s Planning Commission, Dmitri Piskounov of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, Katherine Sierra, vice president of the World Bank, and Xianbin Yao of the Asian Development Bank will lead a whole host of top officials from multilateral, bilateral and national organisations.
Developed countries have added almost all the extra carbon dioxide – the main GHG – to the atmosphere from the start of the Industrial Age. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol meant to tackle this rising menace, developed countries (with the exception of the US) committed themselves to reducing their GHG emissions by five percent by 2012, compared to 1990 levels.
It now appears that most industrialised countries will fail to meet this commitment. Meanwhile, they have shifted their focus on the rising economies of China and India, and have been insisting that these countries accept mandatory reductions in GHG emissions in a post-2012 treaty.
India has been resisting stoutly, saying that providing electricity to its entire population is its first priority and pointing out that its per capita GHG emission is one-20th of that in the US and one-15th of that in the European Union countries.
In response, the developed countries have been pointing out that India is already the world’s fifth largest emitter of GHG. At the recent World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, the Danish prime minister had said that the US, China and India must agree to cut their carbon emissions in any successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
Minister of Science and Technology Kapil Sibal, who led the Indian delegation at the Bali conference, has said the country does not even want to consider any successor to the Kyoto Protocol till the industrialised countries meet their commitments under the protocol.
The issue is likely to come up again during DSDS, where the major items under discussion will include the scientific evidence for climate change, the equity and ethical dimensions of burden sharing when it comes to mitigating GHG emissions, mitigation and adaptation policies, possible technological and policy solutions, and the ensuing global negotiations as the world moves towards a possible new climate change treaty by the end of 2009.