BackObama offers India support to tackle climate change
India, US plan initiatives including cooperation on reducing air pollution in Indian cities under a five-year agreement
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New Delhi: US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that the world will not stand a chance against climate change if emerging economies such as India don’t cut carbon emissions even if the US does so.
Obama said that being “global partners means confronting the urgent global challenge of climate change" and offered to help India in dealing with the impact of climate change so that India doesn’t have to deal with the burden alone.
Climate change and initiatives to ensure a cleaner environment were among the points discussed during Obama’s India visit.
India and the US have lined up several initiatives to deal with climate change under a five-year agreement that will be signed between the two nations soon. The initiatives include cooperation on improving air quality in some of the severely polluted Indian cities.
Under this, the US will implement the AIRNow international programme, aimed at disseminating information to urban residents to help them reduce their exposure to harmful levels of air pollution.
It would also enable urban policy planners to implement corrective strategies for improving ambient air quality in cities, allowing for estimates of health and climate change co-benefits of these strategies. The AIRNow programme basically tells one how polluted one’s outdoor air is along with associated health effects. The environment ministry has also recently developed an air quality index so people can check the real time quality of air around them.
Quality of air in Indian cities has become a controversial issue in the past few years. Recently, the Supreme Court and the National Green Tribunal had taken up the matter, passing several orders to ensure cleaner air.
India and the US already have several programmes of cooperation, including the US-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy, and after the January summit meeting both sides have agreed to expand policy dialogues and technical work on low greenhouse gas emissions technologies.
The other major area of close cooperation would be hydroflurocarbons (HFCs), as the two countries agreed to build on “prior understandings from September 2014" concerning the phase-down of HFCs. Both Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to cooperate on making concrete progress in the Montreal Protocol later this year.
They also decided to discuss ways to reduce the environmental and emissions impact of heavy vehicles and auto fuels by working to adopt cleaner fuels and emissions standards in India.
During a town-hall address at the Siri Fort auditorium in New Delhi, Obama said that “with rising seas, melting Himalayan glaciers, more unpredictable monsoon, cyclones getting stronger, few countries will be more affected by a warmer planet than India."
“The US recognizes our part in creating this problem so we are leading the global effort to combat it. I know the argument made by some that it’s unfair for countries like the US to ask developing nations and emerging economies like India to reduce your dependence on same fossil fuels that help powered our growth for more than a century," said Obama.
“But here is the truth, even if countries like US curb our emissions, if countries that are growing rapidly like India, with soaring energy needs, don’t also embrace cleaner fuels, then we don’t stand a chance against this climate change," he added.
Developing and developed nations have been at loggerheads because developed countries such as the US want India and China to take ambitious emission cuts but developing nations like India insist that to eradicate poverty, they need to grow, resulting in growth of their emission levels.
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