Inaugurating the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS) organised by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) here on Thursday Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the National Plan of Action on Climate Change would be released in June while emphasising the need to ensure an acceptable standard of living for all people following sustainable path for development.

“We need technology innovations for reduction of energy use by industry and other sectors for which there is a need to plan and fund the whole gamut of development action. Our 11th Five Year Plan has articulated strategies in many of the areas like afforestation, drought proofing and protection of coasts,” he said.

India has decided to link all academic institutions that work on climate change on a national knowledge net and also identify key knowledge institutions that become centres of excellence in climate change related research.

At the international level, India will continue to engage with all nations to strengthen global initiatives in the area of climate change. “India is prepared to commit that our per capita carbon emissions will never exceed the average per capita emissions of developed industrialised countries. Moreover, as developed countries take measures to bring down their per capita carbon emissions, our threshold would come down too,” Dr. Singh said.

Pointing out that even as India was engaged internationally in creating a global strategy to address climate change, the Prime Minister said that the Government would in parallel work on local, sub-national and national action to meet the challenges of climate change. The impact of climate change falls differently on people and the poor are the worst hit. Action on climate change can then become an action for poverty reduction to reduce the vulnerability of the poor people everywhere, he said while adding that India could not continue with a global development model in which some countries continued to maintain high carbon emissions, while the development options available for developing countries get constrained.

“We, therefore, need to ensure an acceptable standard of living for all our people but would choose a sustainable path for that development.”

Nations of the world will have to engage in the next two years to create a consensus on a new architecture for cooperation that involves both finance and technology support to countries for adaptation, Dr. Singh said.

‘Distortions’

Expressing concern over ‘distortions’ that had crept into the country’s energy pricing policies, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has sought a national debate on the issue.

He also sought to know whether the country was hurting its future energy security needs by shirking the responsibility to grapple with the political challenges at hand.