The Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, which was defunct for the last three years, has been reconstituted by the Government on Wednesday.

This comes ahead of key climate change talks set to take place in Lima, Peru, in December and in Paris, France in 2015.

The statement announcing the reconstitution of the panel said it would “evolve a coordinated response to issues relating to climate change at the national level, provide oversight for formulation of action plans in the area of assessment, adaptation and mitigation of climate change, and monitor key policy decisions.

It is believed that the Council would also set the path of negotiation for the Government at international-level engagement. India is also expected to announce its voluntary targets for reducing greenhouse gases emissions by June 2015, when a new pact will be signed at the Conference of Parties meet at Paris. Besides, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the new Council would include several key ministers — Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Minister for Environment Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Water Resources Uma Bharti, Minister for Agriculture Radha Mohan Singh, Minister for Urban Development Venkaiah Naidu, MoS (Power, Coal and NRE) Piyush Goyal and Minister for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh.

However, of the independent experts, the Director General of Centre for Science and Environment Sunita Narain and industrialist Ratan Tata have been dropped from the Council. They were part of the panel constituted under the previous UPA regime in 2007.

Chairman of The Energy and Resources Institute, RK Pachauri, along with economist Nitin Desai and retired diplomat Chandrasekar Dasgupta have been retained in the Council.

Ajay Mathur, Chairperson, BEE, J.M. Mouskar and Principal Secretary to Prime Minister will be the other members of the high-level panel.

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