Team to reassert importance of historical emissions in the discussions at Warsaw
The Union Environment and Forests Minister Jayanthi Natarajan and climate negotiators’ team got the approval from the Union Cabinet on Thursday to reassert the importance of historical emissions in the new climate agreement, which is to be discussed at Warsaw beginning November 11.
The Cabinet cleared the non-negotiable lines for the team deciding that India would ensure that in a pledge-based top-down agreement the onus to take emission cuts for meeting the 2 degree Celsius target lies strongly on the developed countries.
At the ongoing U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks, the 195-member countries have all but come around to having what is called a bottoms-up approach under the new global climate compact to be signed in 2015. In this format each country volunteers targets for emission reduction based on its capability instead of a top-down approach where targets are set down through the negotiations for each country. Some countries have suggested that the volunteered targets can then be assessed to see if they add up to meet the requirement of keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degree Celsius. The U.S. has disagreed and demanded that increasing the volunteered targets should be left to the respective country to decide and there should not be a formal mechanism forcing the nations to do so.
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