No such thing as advanced developing country: India

Thursday, 09 April 2009, 22:53 IST
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Bonn: India has told the UN that there is no such thing as an "advanced developing country" - a category that was sought to be introduced by Japan at a just-ended inconclusive global meet on climate change. The 10-day meet was the first in a series organised by the UN leading up to a December summit where countries will seek to hammer out an agreement on how to tackle climate change. At the Bonn meeting industrialised countries demanded that major developing countries such as India and China ought to make specific commitments to lower their emissions of greenhouse gases, which contribute to climate change. India objected, saying the demand runs against a key principle of the UN climate change negotiating process - that industrialised countries, who are historically responsible for causing climate change, must take the first major steps before developing countries follow suit. The Japanese delegation said India and China are now "advanced developing countries" and must therefore be lumped together with developed countries such as the US, European countries and Japan. The Indian delegation, led by the Prime Minister's Special Envoy on Climate Change, Shyam Saran, rejected the demand. "There have been references to terms such as advanced developing countries which lie outside the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and even outside the scope of any agreed language," Saran said at the conference's closing Wednesday. Saran said some proposals also mentioned "numbers and figures that have no basis in sound science but are based on subjective assumptions which the authors do not even reveal."
Source: IANS
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