India rolls out process to ratify Paris Agreement for tackling climate change

The Economic Times , Tuesday, July 05, 2016
Correspondent : UrmiGoswami
NEW DELHI: India said that it has initiated the domestic process for ratifying the Paris Agreement, the global treaty to tackle climate change adopted by 195 countries in December.

Addressing the seventh edition of the informal ministerial meet, Petersberg Dialogue, co-hosted by Germany and Morocco, the chair of the 22nd round of the UN-sponsored climate negotiations, India's environment minister Prakash Javadekar said, "As far as the Ratification is concerned, India has already started the process. Recently when our Prime Minister was in Washington, in a meeting with President Obama, he also emphasized that the process has to be at the earliest and we have already started working in the direction."

Javadekar's statement came on the heels of the renewed calls for ratification by Morocco's environment minister Hakima El Haite and French environment minister Segolene Royal, who is the current chair of the climate negotiations held under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

As he assured the gathering, which included ministers and representatives of 35 countries, that India was moving ahead with the ratification process, Javadekar stressed on the need to focus on the pre-2020 agenda. The Paris Agreement lays out the framework for global effort in the post-2020 period. Developing countries have expressed concern about efforts in the pre-2020 period. While there has been an effort to energise and include business and other non-state actors like cities in efforts to reduce carbon emissions and tackling climate change, there has been little progress on charting a path to meet the commitments made by countries, especially developed countries, to reduce emissions, provide finance and technology.

"Pre-2020 actions are also important and they will be discussed here in Petersburg Dialogue," said Javadekar. A discussion on maximising pre-2020 efforts has been slated during the two-day ministerial consultation.

Reminding the gathering that the Paris Agreement is the outcome of global co-operative effort, however, the real work remains to be done. "What we have achieved in New York in UN is that we signed the agreement and now we have to implement it," the minister said.

Building on the co-operative spirit of Paris, Javadekar said the focus should be on implementing the Paris Agreement and countries will have to work together, assisting each other to ensure co-operation. "Co-operation is the key for taking actions further because every country is at a different level of development."

In doing so, India sought to put at the centrestage the need to provide developing countries the means to implement the measures that could help restrict temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. As on many other occasions in the past, Javadekar made it clear that it would be difficult to achieve a modicum of success without co-operation among countries. "We need cooperation, we have the will to act, but we do not have the wherewithal to do it, not only in terms of finances, but particularly in terms of technology. When we talk of technology, Germany is the most reliable name in technology in many fields and therefore, there is finance, technology and mutual cooperation and walking the talk."

The Petersberg Dialogue is an annual informal ministerial consultation which is co-hosted by the German government and the chair of the annual UN-sponsored climate negotiations. The effort was initiated in 2010 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel following the failure to secure a global agreement on climate change at Copenhagen in 2009. The idea of this annual dialogue is to highlight issues that would be the focal point of the year-end UN-sponsored negotiations, in an effort to understand the different concerns of countries and regional groups and to find ways to arrive at viable and acceptable compromise solutions.

 
SOURCE : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/india-rolls-out-process-to-ratify-paris-agreement-for-tackling-climate-change/articleshow/53045515.cms?prtpage=1
 


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