Equity must be the bottomline when devising any global regime on environment, whether it is climate change, biodiversity, Rio+20 or global commons, the Union Environment Minister, Ms. Jayanthi Natarajan, today said.
Taking on from the stand taken by Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, at the inauguration of the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS) organised by The Energy Research Institute (TERI), Ms. Natarajan said “There are no boundaries and the impact will be felt by all. While contributing voluntarily to the global commons, it must be with equity and justice.”
While appreciating that the global regime for protecting biodiversity has to be ambitious, the minister said it has to be firmly rooted, at the same time, in the Rio principles of common but differentiated responsibility and equity.
Recalling that India took some very important decisions at the recent UN conference on climate change at Durban to advance the international actions on global climate change, Ms. Natarajan said, “The principles of equity and CBDR are vital to the success of any global agreement in the field of environment. Our goal should be to ensure that the outcome of the ensuing negotiations under the Durban Platform is firmly founded on these principles and that we avoid the pitfalls in implementation that such agreements have suffered in the past.”
In her keynote address at the special session on biodiversity Ms. Natarajan urged experts to consider how they could relate to the lay person to save biodiversity and demystify the issues of global commons for normal people to understand and make this into a people’s movement.
She discussed the inter-linkages that biodiversity has with global commons, with economy, with the atmosphere, with ordinary men and women, in short with all elements of the world. Noting the importance of biodiversity, the minister said it is taking place in the context of Conference of Parties (CoP-11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which India is hosting in Hyderabad in October this year.
