INDIA CLIMATE WATCH – APRIL 2010 (Issue13)
Inside this issue
Editorial: Meetings like this?
SAARC summit: promise of possibility?
Industries get a PAT this year
New EU Climate Commissioner visits Maldives and India
Old wine in new bottle: BASIC meet and declare
Uttarakhand Government’s meet on environment
Climate events round-up
Editor:
Malini Mehra
Research & Reporting
Kaavya Nag, Somya Bhatt, Pranav Sinha, Malini Mehra
April was a month of high-profile climate meetings. While neighbourhood diplomacy stepped up a gear with the SAARC Summit, the newly-emerging markets powerbloc, BASIC, met in Cape Town to strategize on climate positions. A continent away in Europe, UN member states came together for the first time since the fiasco of Copenhagen to declaim on climate and prepare for the 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) meeting under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Mexico later this year. The short weekend meeting – held from Friday 9th April – Sunday 11 April, brought the two Working Groups on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP 11) and Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA 9), together for the next round of negotiations following on from Copenhagen.
The mood music was not cheerful. Recriminations were still floating and bruisings from the battle for the Copenhagen Accord still evident. Not the best indication that the world is on course to meet the climate challenge – still in the world of diplomacy, if one meeting fails, there will surely be another one not far off. Not the ideal sense of urgency one would hope for but it does means that the June session of the UNFCCC in Bonn has to raise the game considerably.
SAARC summit: promise of possibility?
Climate Change was the theme of the Sixteenth Meeting of the Heads of State of SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), which took place in Thimphu, Bhutan, on 28-29 April 2010. Heads of State of the eight countries adopted the ‘Thimphu Statement on Climate Change’, which includes among other things, establishing an inter-governmental expert group on climate change, and planting ten million trees in the region over the next five years (2010-15).
The statement is fairly detailed in the promises it hopes to keep, including providing capital for low-carbon technologies, a massive regional afforestation and reforestation campaign, future plans to protect archaeological monuments, strengthen understanding of shared oceans, biodiversity, mountain ecosystems, monsoon initiative, and plan for disaster risk reduction.
The summit also called for cooperation among member states on a range of issues including the formation of an expert group, knowledge sharing and capacity building.
The leaders underscored the need to initiate a process to formulate a common SAARC position on climate change for COP16, including issues such as separate financing for adaptation and mitigation, and technology transfer. Divergent economic drivers have so far been some of the biggest barriers to a common SAARC position, with countries such as the Maldives and Bangladesh on the one hand pushing for strong international pledges in the interests of reducing the adverse future effects of climate change, and developing major India, also a part of SAARC, committing only to reducing emissions intensity by 20-25 percent by 2020.
Listed below are the key initiatives and proposals:
· Establish an Inter-governmental Expert Group on Climate Change to develop clear policy direction and guidance for regional cooperation
· Commission a study on ‘Climate Risks in the Region’
· Explore the feasibility of a SAARC mechanism that will provide financial capital for low-carbon technology and renewable energy projects
· Strengthen the understanding of shared water bodies in the region through an Marine Initiative
· Inter-governmental Mountain Initiative to study mountain ecosystems and glaciers, and their contribution to livelihoods and sustainable development
· an Inter-governmental Monsoon Initiative on the evolving pattern of monsoons to assess vulnerability due to climate change
· SAARC Inter-governmental Climate-related Disasters Initiative on the integration of Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) with Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)
· Establish institutional linkages among national institutions in the region to facilitate sharing of knowledge and capacity building programmes in climate change
· Enhance cooperation in the energy sector to facilitate energy trade, development of efficient conventional and renewable energy sources including
hydropower.
· Action Plan on Energy Conservation would be prepared by the SAARC Energy Centre (SEC), Islamabad and creation of a web portal on Energy Conservation
for exchange of information and sharing of best practices among SAARC Member States.
Climate change has become a core issue for SAARC as the entire region is vulnerable to the impacts of environmental degradation and regional collaborative efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change have gained prominence. However, although climate change has been part of the agenda right from the 5th SAARC Summit in 1990, even a 2007 ministerial meet in Dhaka and the ‘SAARC Action Plan on Climate Change’ yielded no concrete results. Pledges to act on the Action Plan between 2009 and 2012 have not yet been initiated. While leaders have pledged in Thimphu to review its implementation and establish an expert group under it to develop a clear policy direction it remains to be seen whether actions will follow words.
Neither did SAARC countries defend a common position at Poznan (2008) or Copenhagen (2009) at the UN conferences on climate change.
While this April 2010 Thimphu Summit provided an opportunity to devise a common climate agenda as a regional group, it remains to be seen whether possible areas of cooperation will be implemented or shelved, as is the normal pattern.
Industries get a PAT this year
Indian industry is the primary consumer of electrical energy in India, accounting for 42 percent of the country’s total commercial energy use in 2004-05. With a high growth rate across all industry sectors (small, medium and large enterprises), electricity capacity addition needs to touch 400 GW by 2030 if it is to meet the demands of all consumers (private and commercial) across the country.The Indian government hopes to meet some of this deficit by improving energy efficiency across both electricity providers and consumers through the National Mission on Enhanced Energy Efficiency (NMEEE). This rather than increasing production while doing nothing about inefficiencies in the sector appears to be the way forward.
The NMEEE is expected to account for annual fuel savings in excess of 23 million toe by 2014, achieve a cumulative avoided electricity capacity addition of 19,000 MW, and save 98 million tons CO2 emissions per year.
The “Perform Achieve and Trade” (PAT) scheme is a market-based mechanism under the NMEEE, crucial for achieving these targets. It aims to fix specific energy consumption (SEC) targets for large energy-guzzling installations across India. Nine sectors in which the PAT scheme is to be operationalised have been identified – power stations, cement, steel, fertilisers, aluminium, chlor-alkali, paper, textiles and railways. 714 energy-intensive installations across these sectors have been identified as the initial targets for the PAT scheme. The scheme is limited to energy efficiency targets, and does not cover other sources of carbon emissions.
Under the PAT scheme, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (the implementer of the NMEEE) will issue Energy Savings Certificates (ESCerts) to the identified (714) installations (factories or power production facilities), against targets that the BEE will set for them. Installations will have to meet their targets, and those having excess ESCerts can sell credits to those who fall short – much like the Kyoto protocol’s carbon credit mechanism.
Speaking at the 2nd Indo German Energy Symposium, BEE Director General, Ajay Mathur said ‘a wide bandwidth of energy efficiencies occurs in almost all industry sectors which creates a differentiated potential for energy savings. Designing benchmarks and standards are challenging tasks for us’. What he means to say, for those of us unfamiliar with energy terms, is that owing to several standards and benchmarks, BEE is not going to insist on one single benchmark across all industries. Instead, Industry will be allowed to gradually become more energy-efficient from their present levels.
A time frame of three years, beginning April 2011, has been set out by BEE for driving energy-intensive manufacturing companies to adhere to energy conservation norms, and for ESCerts to become a reality.
New EU Climate Commissioner Visits Maldives and India
The European Union’s new Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, visited Maldives on 6 April and India on 7-9 April to convey a fresh EU negotiating strategy on climate talks post Copenhagen. The Maldives and India were among the countries which negotiated the Copenhagen Accord, the principal outcome of the Copenhagen conference, and both have pledged emission reduction actions under it.
This visit was part of the EU outreach programme to pick up the threads from the December 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen and discuss how to take international negotiations forward.
As part of her visit to India, Commissioner Hedegaard met environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and the Minister of Coal & Mines, Prakash Jaiswal. She also met with a small group of representatives from industry, NGOs, think tanks, and the World Bank to discuss adaptation and mitigation of climate change including options for low carbon strategies and measures in India.
She commented that India and China cannot be looked at as a single unit, since challenges are different for both countries. Also, that the United States and China need to be moved on climate action. She hoped that India through BASIC as well as other forums could influence China. Hedegaard was against using climate and environment opportunities to create new trade wars, but rather to channel the opportunities through an international framework for a carbon trading system.
As far as the international climate negotiations, the EU wants to get agreement on key elements in Cancun, where the COP16 talks are scheduled in 2010 December, and knock in some progress on contentious issues such as legal form for discussion between Cancun and South Africa (2011).
Also, 24-member European parliamentary delegation, led by Chairman Graham Watson visited India between 26-29th April 2010 to seek fruitful dialogue with India on security, terrorism and climate change, apart from greater cooperation in energy security, cultural and people to people exchange.
Old wine new bottle: BASIC meet and declare
Environment Ministers from the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) block of countries met in Cape Town in late April, in what is now the second time since Copenhagen that the group has met.
The group issued a joint statement in which it called for renewed focus on maintaining the existing framework of the international negotiations – the two-track approach of the Kyoto Protocol for short-term industrialised country emission reduction targets, and the Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) for action under the Convention. Ministers maintained that political agreements on contentious issues must be ‘translated’ into the official negotiating texts, but that the UNFCCC is the only legitimate forum for climate change negotiations.
Stating that ‘internationally binding legal agreements already exist’ under the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the Kyoto Protocol, Ministers felt that the UNFCCC process must conclude a legally binding outcome by Cancun this year, or at the most, by 2011 when negotiations will be held in South Africa. The Joint Statement also pushed for operationalising the promised fast-track finance of USD 10 billion to developing countries for adaptation and mitigation action.
The previous meeting, held prior to the January 31st deadline for the Copenhagen Accord’s proposed country actions submissions, was held in New Delhi. Here, ministers met to discuss a common strategy and response to the Copenhagen Accord. The group also indicated that they would soon announce a BASIC-led fund to help other developing countries cope with climate change. However, no details regarding the BASIC fund have emerged from the April 25th Cape Town meeting, although reference to the Delhi meeting was made in the joint statement.
While the Joint Statement elaborated areas under the UNFCCC negotiations that could make progress prior to Cancun, such as fast start finance, implementation of REDD, architecture on technology transfer, adaptation programmes and a MRV work programme; no significant internal (i.e. BASIC-centric) actions were proposed or elaborated from previous meetings.
The BASIC countries decided that moving forward, they would hold another meeting, this time in Brazil, to recast the equity debate
Uttarakhand Government’s meet on Environment
Following in the footsteps of Nepal, which held a cabinet meeting at the Mount Everest base camp to draw the attention of the world community towards receding glaciers, the government of Uttarakhand held a 12-member cabinet meeting on the banks of River Ganga at Haridwar. The main objective of this meeting was to highlight the environmental concerns of the state with a major focus on the River Ganga and the receding Gangotri glacier.
The meeting led to the decision to set up a Ganga Conservation Board – an autonomous body which will work towards the restoration of the river and the Gangotri glacier. The government has also billed a plan called the ‘Ganga Nirmal Yojna’ which will work on the cleaning the river. A six point resolution was passed in order to achieve the mammoth task of cleaning the river.
EVENTS ROUNDUP FOR THE MONTH OF APRIL 2010
1. 1, 2 and 3 April 2010, The Al Gore Sustainable technology venture competition, Chennai: Hosted by IIT Madras, it is Asia’s first and most prestigious sustainable/clean technology business plan competition, founded in 2007
2. 7 April 2010, National Workshop on Climate Smart Disaster Risk Management, New Delhi: Organised by SEED and Christian Aid with support from DFID, this conference focused around filling the gaps between climate change adaptation, social protection and disaster risk reduction.
3. 12 and 13 April 2010, Algae Bio-fuel Workshop, New Delhi: Organised by the Grow Diesel Climate Care Council the main focus of the workshop was the next generation bio fuel using algae as a main feedstock. The workshop brought together investors, entrepreneurs, Bio fuel companies, renewable fuel experts, their associates and academia to share their valuable experiences and knowledge.
4. 13 April 2010, Climate leader initiative on ‘Climate Change and Conservation’, Kolkata: Organised by EMPATHY this seminar focused on the key issues related to Environment and conservation and saw participation from different stakeholders.
5. 23 and 24 April 2010, National Conference on Ensuring Food Security in a Changing Climate, New Delhi: This conference was jointly organised by Gene Campaign and Action Aid India the conference was attended by participants from twenty two states. A range of speakers representing the scientific community, the government, academics, international organizations and civil society groups working on agriculture and environment spoke about the various issues involved in ensuring food security in a changing climate.
6. 27 April 2010, Water Conclave, New Delhi: Organised by CII with proper management of available water resources being the main theme this conclave saw the participation from a number of investors, entrepreneurs, academia, scientists, water resources experts and other stakeholders.
7. 28 and 29 April 2010, 2nd Indo-German Energy Symposium, New Delhi: Organised by the Indo-German Energy forum this symposium had two main focus areas being decentralized renewable energies and demand side energy efficiency. Meeting the objective of decoupling development from energy consumption and related CO2 emissions, India submitted within the National Action Plan on Climate Change the National Solar Mission and the National Mission on Enhanced Energy Efficiency. The agenda of the Symposium was to strengthen the bilateral dialogue focussing on these initiatives
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