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Journalism of Courage
Putting words to what till now was understood to be implicit,Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday said that Indias position on climate change was being dictated primarily by its economic interest and foreign policy priorities.
While negotiating the climate change agreement,India is being guided by three principles: the need to protect our economic interests that is paramount; the pursuit of a domestic climate agenda that includes both mitigation as well as adaptation; and achievement of our foreign policy objectives, Ramesh told reporters after his arrival in Cancun to attend the ministerial segment of the climate change conference.
We need to ensure that we do not deviate from any of these three principles, he said.
Jairam said India was looking at a balanced set of operationally meaningful outcomes from Cancun,since it was clear that a full-fledged treaty was not possible at this time.
What I mean by operationally meaningful is a set of decisions that can be acted upon put into practice immediately. We dont have much time on our hands, he said.
The Environment Minister said he was not very encouraged by the way things had gone in Cancun in the first week. My greatest disappointment is to see that the rich countries are unable to act on their commitment made in the Copenhagen Accord to provide $30 billion to the fast-start fund, he said,pointing out that the US had so far committed only $1.8 billion to this fund.
The worlds economic machine,the pre-eminent power is able to find only $1.8 billion… even out of that $400 million is in the form of export credit. This is very,very disappointing, he said.
But he expressed satisfaction that some progress had been made in areas like technology and forestry sector and hoped that widescale agreements on these would be converted into meaningful and actionable outcomes at Cancun.
