India to resist attempt to bring black carbon within UNFCCC: Jairam Ramesh

He highlighted that India will be launching a national programme for “measuring,monitoring and modeling” black carbon.

Noting that black carbon was bad for the environment and health,environment minister underlined that India intended to battle the gas,which is produced when burning biomass and old cooking methods.

At the same time,Ramesh stressed that India was not a major carbon emitter and would not agree to black carbon being included in the Kyoto Protocol within the U.N. framework.

“We believe that controlling black carbon is not just good for the environment because it is also good for health,” the minister said,adding “India needs to take black carbon seriously because of its public health impact.”

Black carbon or soot,is produced from the incomplete combustion of diesel fuel,and according to Veerabhadran Ramanathan,a professor of atmospheric physics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,the world could easily get rid of them.

“Other potent warming agents include three short-lived gases – methane,some hydrofluorocarbons and lower atmospheric ozone – and dark soot particles,” he wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times just ahead of conference.

“The warming effect of these pollutants,which stay in the atmosphere for several days to about a decade,is already about 80 per cent of the amount that carbon dioxide causes,” said the scientist who will be helping with India’s efforts to fix its black carbon problem.

Ramanathan further observed that “the world could easily and quickly reduce these pollutants; the technology and regulatory systems needed to do so are already in place.”

Ramanathan pointed out that soot is responsible for some 1.9 million deaths a year,it melts ice and snow packs,and soot from India,China and a few other countries threatens water supplies fed by the Himalayan-Tibetan.

“In China and India,a programme to improve power generation,filter soot from diesel engines,reduce emissions from brick-making kilns and provide more efficient cookstoves could cut the levels of soot in those regions by about two-thirds – and benefit countries downwind as well,” he wrote.