New Delhi: The Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh on Monday launched the National Action Plan on Climate Change in New Delhi. It incorporates the country’s vision of sustainable development, mitigate global warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking at the launch, the Prime Minister said that this reflects the great importance attached to mobilising the national energies and resources in meeting the challenge of climate change.

He added that without a careful long-term strategy, climate change may undermine development efforts, with adverse consequences, across the board, on the people’s livelihood and the living standards.

Encompassing a very broad and extensive range of measures, the plan focuses on the national energies of eight national missions, which will be pursued as key components of the country’s strategy for sustainable development.

These include national missions on solar energy, on enhanced energy efficiency, on sustainable habitat, on conserving water, on sustaining the himalayan ecosystem, on creating a “Green India”, on sustainable agriculture and finally, on establishing a strategic knowledge platform for climate change.

“Over a period of time, we must pioneer a graduated shift from economic activity based on fossil fuels to one based on non-fossil fuels and from reliance on non-renewable and depleting sources of energy to renewable sources of energy,” Singh said.

Under the plan, the country will pool its scientific, technical and managerial talent, with sufficient financial resources, to develop solar energy as a source of abundant energy to power the economy and to transform the lives of people.

The National Action Plan is meant to evolve and change in the light of changing circumstances, developments in science and technology and in the global regime that is currently being fashioned through multilateral negotiations.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister assured that despite our developmental imperatives, our per capita GHG emissions will not exceed the per capita GHG emissions of the developed industrialised countries.
—iGovernment Bureau