By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS,
Bonn : India said it was disappointed at the slow pace of progress as global talks to confront climate change ended in Bonn Wednesday amid a widening chasm between developed and developing countries on the future course of action.
As delegates from 175 countries wound up discussions ahead of a final conference in Copenhagen set for mid-December, the leader of the Indian delegation criticised the world’s richest countries for refusing to agree binding cuts on their emission of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
“We have only a few months left in which we must come up with concrete and significant decisions,” said Shyam Saran, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Climate Change.
“The progress achieved so far has been disappointing from our perspective.”
With only six weeks of actual negotiating time left before the Copenhagen meet, Saran said India and other developing countries had no clear indication yet about the emission reduction targets which wealthy industrialised nations are ready to commit to.
In addition, there was “still no clarity” over how much money and technological resources rich countries were willing to pledge to help developing countries meet the hundreds of billions of dollars needed ever year to combat climate change and mitigate its impact.
Delegates attending the Bonn conference – one of three organised by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the run-up to Copenhagen – must now go back to their respective capitals and submit concrete proposals to UNFCCC chairs by April 24.
These will then form the basis of negotiating texts to be discussed in June.
“If this process were a marathon,” said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer, then delegates were in “the final sprint”.
But rich industrialised countries at the conference pitched for an overhaul of the UN framework convention, arguing that large developing countries such as India and China must also commit to binding cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions – something they are exempt from at the moment.
The current convention is based on the �polluter pays’ principle, under which industrialised countries must first enforce massive cuts in their emissions because they are primarily responsible for causing climate change.
“We will not allow them to renegotiate the framework convention,” Dinesh Patnaik, Joint Secretary (UN) at the Ministry of External Affairs, told IANS.
“We are also asking for a relaxation of intellectual property rights (IPR) laws, just as we did with patented HIV/AIDS drugs,” Patnaik said.
“At the end of the day we want an agreement because we will be affected the most by climate change. But developed countries came up with nothing. We don’t need the money, we need technology at low costs,” he added.