Mexico today sought India's sustained political guidance and support for an ambitious outcome at the forthcoming global climate change summit at Cancun.

Ms Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican Minister for Foreign Affairs and chairperson designate of Conference of Parties 16 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), spelt out the major challenges to be faced at the climate change negotiations at Cancun.

“It would be crucial for the negotiating parties to define a long-term goal for reducing carbon emissions,” Ms Espinosa told members of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

Other Challenges

Besides consolidating on the recent advances on mitigation, other challenges include the need for measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of the transfer of resources and technology and additional and predictable sources of finance, both for public and private sectors and understandings on the role of markets and new mechanisms.

“In Cancun we can agree upon the institutional architecture and a number of concrete measures that are necessary to achieve the enhanced implementation of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol without sacrificing our level of ambition or the agreed core principles for which we need to be pragmatic. We also need to focus on substantive issues, beyond the issue of legal form of the outcome,” Ms Espinosa said.

Key ideas

Mr Rajan Bharti Mittal, President, FICCI, pointed out that long-term signals on market-based mechanisms and regulatory certainty from the global climate change negotiations would have a significant bearing on the extent to which businesses engaged in climate change mitigation.

Mr Prodipto Ghosh, former Secretary, Ministry of Environment & Forests, Honorary Environment Advisor, FICCI, and Chairman, FICCI Climate Change Task Force, stated that technology and finance were the key elements for mitigation and therefore the climate change negotiations should provide the basis for a clear-cut framework. Mr Ghosh called for a global fund for technology to pay for collaborative R&D and licence fees for technology transfer and the system needs to devise international funding mechanisms to support the incremental costs of adoption of clean technologies and also development, deployment and diffusion of new and existing low-carbon technologies.