Thaindian News

By Joydeep Gupta
Bonn, June 12 (IANS) Climate negotiators from the Obama administration will be in New Delhi to hold bilateral talks on what India is ready to do to tackle global warming, the leader of the US delegation to a UN conclave said here Friday.

Jonathan Pershing, who led the US delegation at these preparatory talks of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the December summit in Copenhagen, said he had met the leader of the Indian delegation Shyam Saran on the sidelines of the talks here.

“We had a very good meeting, and Mr Saran has invited me to New Delhi,” Pershing said. “We shall go there at the first opportunity. India is a very important player and you cannot have a global agreement (to tackle climate change) without it.”

A member of the India delegation here confirmed that Pershing and other US officials dealing with climate change had been invited to New Delhi, but added that no dates had been fixed yet.

Pershing went to Beijing in the middle of the talks here for a bilateral meeting with China, a move that drew more attention than the June 1-12 conclave here.

Industrialised countries have been saying global warming cannot be fought without active participation of major developing countries such as India and China, while these countries have been refusing to take on any mandatory caps on their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, pointing out that industrialised countries had put almost all the GHG in the atmosphere now.

The US has proposed here that while industrialised countries put a “quantitative limit on their (GHG) emissions, developing countries take actions (to mitigate their emissions) that will be binding, though the outcomes of these actions will not be binding”, Pershing said.

“Advanced developing countries should also say when they will take on these commitments,” he added, while admitting that “additional financial resources will be needed” to help developing countries take action against climate change.