Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) R.K. Pachauri on Monday said he does not have much hope from next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen.
“The kind of agreement that we were hoping for from the summit in Copenhagen seems to have diminished,” Mr. Pachauri, also the director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think-tank based here, said on the sidelines of a conference on urban development.
Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh had earlier said that India is not going to accept any legally binding cuts on its greenhouse gas emissions.
At a conference last week, Mr. Ramesh said: “It seems there is a long haul before we arrive at an international commitment that is legally binding and in which legally binding commitments are taken by the developed countries.”
The December 7-18 summit of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to produce any global deal on combating global warming, because rich countries responsible for the damage have neither promised significant emission cuts nor put on the table significant money to help developing countries fight climate change.
“We should put pressure on the developed countries to tackle the phenomenon of climate change,” said Mr. Pachauri, the man who heads the IPCC which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore for its seminal report on climate change that year.
Adding that India should do whatever it can at the domestic level to tackle climate change, Mr. Pachauri said: “The effects of climate change will put a big burden on our economy and development. So we cannot ignore it.
“We should therefore focus on climate change, otherwise its effects on the coming generations will be huge.”
