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India and China have entered a 5-year deal to jointly combat climate change issues and to reach consensus on international climate pacts. These two nations have also launched a Joint Working Group (JWG). This body will be in-charge of organizing annual meets in China and India on alternative years to talk about their national policies, provisions and execution of related cooperative plans.
The deal was sealed between Jairam Ramesh, the Indian Minister of State for Environment and Forests, and Xie Zhenhua, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Vice-Chairman of China. The Ministry of Environment and Forests of India and NDRC of China will be assigned the authority to implement this pact.
Jairam Ramesh said, “The Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) is first of its kind for both China and India and the cooperation had fructified within the short span of less than a month. There is virtually no difference between Indian and Chinese negotiating positions on international climate treaties”.
According to Xie, “The implementation of the MoA will usher in a new scenario and take cooperation on climate change between the two countries to a new high. The agreement will also keep the Indian side informed on China’s policies on climate change and at the same time help share best practices to improve the approach to deal with the issues involved”.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol are held to be the most efficient framework for dealing with the issues of climate change in the agreement. India and China were the part of the same bloc in the meeting of the G-77 nations on climate negotiations.
The two nations will also be setting up the India-China Partnership on fighting climate change issues to beef up their two-sided dialogues and practical alliance on climate change. The agreement will also target at holding yearly joint research and development programmes in the fields of solar and wind energy, coal technology and forestry and meets of economists and scientists. Ramesh said, “We are discussing further what the two countries should be doing for a successful outcome at Copenhagen”.
In the workshop, analysts from both the sides talked about their own domestic action plans to deal with climate change. The discussion centred upon domestic initiatives, problems in multilateral deals (such as ‘mitigation’, ‘adaptation’, ‘technology transfer’ and fund) and expectations from the Copenhagen conference scheduled to be held in December.
Over 190 countries would participate in Copenhagen conference that is supposed to take place from December 7. The event holds utmost significance as it would mark the final round of discussions on a climate agreement to take the place of Kyoto Protocol that would expire in 2012. India and China want the rich nations including the US to reduce emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2020 and transfer technology to the poorer countries to enable them to tackle climate change.
South Asian Pact
Ramesh said India will take into consideration external calculation and verification of its measures to deal with climate change, if wealthy nations support them with international funds and technology. Business Standard
October 22, 2009
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