Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today reiterated India’s existing stance on climate change, emphasising that financing in this regard has to be new and additional. He insisted it should not be viewed as part of overseas development assistance.
“The prime minister has made a firm commitment of not allowing our per capita greenhouse gas emissions to exceed that of the developed countries. There is a limitation in availability of renewable sources and that is why we have increased reliance on hydrocarbons like coal,” Mukherjee told reporters, while inaugurating CII’s Exhibition on Climate Change here today.
He reasoned that “developed countries have to provide the requisite support for dissemination and adaptation in developing countries, since dispersal and proliferation of cleaner energy technologies is affordable for fast-growing countries with huge energy needs”. He added that developed countries must give large-scale public financing to developing countries for funding their mitigation and adaptation actions.
He highlighted the fact that the US and China together constitute 20 per cent of global emissions and are on top of the list, while India at 4 per cent is a distant third. Besides financing, the climate change negotiations relate to mitigation, tech transfer and adaptation, among others. “We will discuss the financing issue in the G-20 meeting of finance ministers in Scotland in first week of November,” he noted.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change estimates $160-200 billion per year for mitigation and $60-80 billion per year for adaptation. The mitigation costs by 2030 are $240-600 billion and adaptation costs up to $90 billion, he noted. And said clean technology must be developed and shared through international cooperation, besides leveraging private sector participation in green technology.
“India is committed to the ambitious National Action Plan on Climate Change,” he concluded.
