Pressure is mounting on India to address climate change. Every country, including India, needs to take some level of responsibility to address it and act accordingly at the UN-sponsored climate change meet in Paris this December, said David W Cash, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, during a recent India visit.

Cash, who is an environment expert based in the US, has been meeting India’s premier institutional heads and policy makers in the Centre as well as States. Subsequent to the visit of US President Barack Obama and his discussions with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on clean energy, climate change deliberations between American and Indian policy makers have gathered momentum.

“I think developed and developing countries can now collaborate to solve environmental problems and seize the big economic opportunity present in switching over to cleaner technology,” he told BusinessLine .

Clubbing India and China in the same category in terms of the “big changes’’ that happened in the pace of their economic development and level of technical expertise attained in the last 20 years, Cash said that the old equation between developed and developing countries does not apply any more.

Asked whether there would be pressure on India to come up with emission reduction commitments since China has already done so, Cash said that India, too, is taking steps towards a cleaner energy future.

“India has been showing it can do it. It has done a lot in the area of both solar and wind energy. It has shown interest in attaining energy efficiency,” he said.

Betting big on the global emission trading programme which has so far met with limited success, Cash is sure that it would feature prominently in discussions in the run up to the Paris meet.

“The global emission trading programme has not worked well everywhere, but in the places where it has worked, like in the EU and the nine-state consortium in the US, people have experienced the many benefits of the programme,” Cash said.

He added that more countries are now realising that there are efficiency gains from such programmes, which would lead to a reduction of emissions, at a lower cost, and also spur innovation.

The opportunity

Cash said that when a Government decides to adopt cleaner technology, an incentive policy mechanism could work to the advantage of all stakeholders.

“A country has to let its industry know what the new standards, based on science and technology, are going to be in future. They should be given clear time posts. This will lead to competition to figure out the cheapest technology — it could be clean coal, wind, solar or any new technology,” he said.

Once countries realise that they are looking at huge economic opportunities related to moving towards a clean energy future, it would be easier for them to take appropriate decisions, he said.

“The economic opportunities are related not just to technologies but also to health impacts as clean energy is going to bring down diseases and increase efficiency,” Cash said.

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