Jairam Ramesh, former Union Minister for Environment, is not impressed with the emission reduction commitments that India announced last week.
In a chat with BusinessLine , he said while there was no surprise in the levels of commitments, “the forest targets are laughable given the way the government is liberally opening up forest areas”.
Ramesh reiterated his stand that India should not link its programmes aimed towards emission reduction with availability of international funding, which is anyway difficult to get.
“I think this linking with international finance and technology is the old Indian shibboleth and has little contemporary meaning,” he said.
“We need to do things on our own because one, we are most vulnerable; two, there are huge co-benefits in terms of positive impact on public health; and three, we are perfectly capable of generating the finance and technology ourselves.”
Ramesh said that more than the voluntary emission reduction commitments, (called ‘intended nationally determined contributions’ or INDCs), the important element in the agreement in the forthcoming Paris climate talks would be ‘measuring, reporting and verification’.
(India has been opposed to MRV, saying it would tantamount to violation of India’s sovereignty.)
Without a proper system of MRV, the INDCs would be meaningless, Ramesh said.
All countries, he said, should be prepared to hold themselves accountable for their commitments. India’s pragmatism will be tested on this count, he added.
India’s INDCs were announced by the Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar, recently.
The commitments included aiming for 40 per cent of total power generation capacity from non-fossil fuels by 2030.
Reacting to this, Ramesh said that it was no big deal because even today India’s non-fossil fuel generation capacity is around 27 per cent. He described it as “nothing revolutionary”.
“What is important is the solar trajectory that is expected to increase from 3 Gigawatts now to at least 100 Gigawatts by 2022. It is hugely ambitious but it must get done,” he said.
On the target to reduce emission intensity (emissions per unit of GDP), Ramesh recalled that when he first spoke about voluntarily reducing emission intensity in the Copenhagen conference of 2009, he was “bitterly criticised by the BJP for surrendering India’s sovereignty”.
Pointing out that it is “now, the item number one in our INDC portfolio,” he said that the BJP has finally accepted the concept of emission intensity.