India hopes for success of Paris climate summit

Consensus continues to elude the outcome document for the Paris climate summit where Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch a global solar alliance while US President Barack Obama will announce another programme on the R&D on the renewable.

The draft of the final agreement is riddled with gaping holes as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius admitted there are “too many things in the bracket” in the draft negotiating text prepared in Bonn last month.

The Bonn text is the basis for negotiations at the UN climate summit, which is officially called the 21st session of the Conference of Parties (CoP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

India had rejected a large portion of the Bonn text and raised its objections at the final pre-CoP meeting in Paris.

“We hope that the Paris agreement would be fair and equitable. We are trying to find out landing zones on several issues and hope that Paris agreement would be a move forward from the Kyoto Protocol,” Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said here.

Fabius admitted finance, technological support, evaluation and keeping the global temperature rise within the two degrees Celsius guard rail are some of the challenges for the negotiators.

France hopes for a big political push from  137 heads of states and government at the inauguration of the climate summit.

“Afterwards, it’s our task to deliver the agreement,” said Fabius, who is the president of the Paris summit. Despite repeated queries, he did not react to the US Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks that “India would be a challenge in Paris.”

Fabius said launching the global solar alliance by Modi and Hollande will be one of the highlights of the Paris summit. The solar alliance would comprise more than 100 nations, located between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

The new grouping will not only provide a common platform to learn from mutual experiences and evolve common financial solutions, but also act as a pressure group to demand improved access to better technology and funds from rich nations. In Paris, Obama will also launch a programme on research and development for new technologies.