Basic negotiating point is our low per capita income Between 1990 and 2005, emission intensity went down by 17.6 per cent NEW DELHI: India on Thursday announced 20-25 per cent carbon emission intensity cuts on the 2005 levels by 2020. This would be done through a series of measures including mandatory fuel efficiency standards for all vehicles, a compulsory green building code and switching over to clean coal technology. Following a four-hour...
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A time for numbers
The government appears to have taken a final call going into the climate change summit at Copenhagen that India’s traditional stand, that developing countries are not obliged to cut emissions, is unlikely to change. Yet there remains considerable wiggle room available to India’s negotiators. The temptation, however, to keep that wiggle room as large as possible, at the cost of atmospherics going in, must be avoided. The government for a...
More »UN-backed report urges Pacific nations to scale up response to HIV/AIDS
A new United Nations-backed report calls on countries in the Pacific Ocean region to scale up their response to HIV and AIDS, which is being fuelled in the region by violence against women, stigma and unprotected sex. According to “Turning the tide: an OPEN strategy for a response to AIDS in the Pacific,” the first report published by the Commission on AIDS in the Pacific, an estimated 59,000 people were...
More »Global economy to rise by 2.4 per cent in 2010, but recovery still ‘fragile’ – UN
The United Nations predicted today that the world economy would bounce back next year with a global growth rate of 2.4 percent, but warned of a risk of a double-dip recession if the wrong policies are implemented. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Rob Vos, Director of Development Policy and Analysis from the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), ahead of the launch next month of the...
More »Road to Copenhagen by R Ramachandran
It has been a bumpy ride, with developed countries failing to make definite commitments and India hinting at a shift of stance. THE last leg of the climate change talks held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 2-6 in the run-up to the all-important 15th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen in December did not result in any dramatic development...
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