By IANS,
New Delhi : Climate change is one of three issues that dominate the international agenda today; the others are terrorism and the global financial crisis. India’s Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh is now keen to ensure that climate change becomes part of the “domestic political discourse”.
“Climate change will be discussed when the prime minister attends the G8 summit next week and then the NAM (Non-Aligned Meeting) summit later next month,” Ramesh told the media here Tuesday.
But “India must stop looking at climate change purely as an international issue. It is most fundamentally a domestic, local issue. It affects water security, land productivity, agricultural yields and energy consumption”.
To this end, the ministry would soon hold briefings for NGOs, senior officials in the corporate sector and state governments.
The minister also said the government had asked The Energy and Resources Institute to model what was going to happen to India on the climate change front, assuming an annual economic growth rate of eight percent.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unveiled India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) exactly a year ago. The eight “missions” listed in the plan are still being finalised, and Ramesh said detailed “action plans” would be ready by the end of the year.
Secretary in the ministry Vijai Sharma pointed out five of the eight missions were oriented towards adaptation to climate change. He described the domestic programme as “concrete”.
Ramesh said in the next 10-15 years, India and the rest of the world would “have to redefine gross domestic product as green domestic product. We need massive investments in afforestation, sustainable agriculture and water security.
“There’s no doubt that green is the way to go. It means big business too.” On Oct 22-23, India is hosting an international conference on green technology development and transfer, and the minister was confident the country could become a global leader in these technologies.
While pointing out that eight percent of India’s power generation was from renewable sources and the plan was to ramp it up to 20 percent in the next decade, Ramesh said there was no escaping from the use of coal to generate energy.
“It is India’s karma that we have to use a billion tonnes of coal per year within the next 10 years. Without coal, there is no economic future, no power. So we have to find a better way to use it – thermal power stations using super-critical technologies, coal gasification and the use of algae to scrub carbon dioxide from flue gases.”
Asked what would induce Indian industry to move to greener technologies, Ramesh hoped there would be fiscal incentives for this in the budget to be unveiled next week. “Climate change is here,” he asserted. “India is being affected. We need to do something because it is in our interest.”
He informed that India already has a programme to study climate change, involving 98 institutions and 227 scientists. “Unfortunately, most of the climate change science is being done in western countries. We shouldn’t have other scientists telling us what is happening to Himalayan glaciers. I’m in touch with scientists of Indian origin abroad, who want to build scientific capability in this area here.”
Apart from the NAPCC, the minister said, India has 24 other “critical initiatives” to combat climate climate change. They relate to energy efficiency in power generation, renewable energy technology development programmes, improving disaster management response to extreme climate events, protection of coastal areas, and improving the health sector to tackle the increased burden of diseases caused by climate change.