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NEW DELHI: India hopes to be a “bridge player” and help break a deadlock between advanced and developing nations over how to fight climate change, the country’s environment minister said Friday.
“India is positioning itself as a bridge player” between rich and poor nations, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, who is attending UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, told India’s NDTV news network.
“We want to be a bridge between the developed and the developing world,” he said ahead of his departure for Cancun.
The November 29 to December 10 summit aims to advance efforts towards a post-2012 climate treaty after the near-disaster of the December 2009 Copenhagen summit.
Ramesh, who is known in India as a strong environmentalist, said New Delhi had some “concrete proposals on forestry, on technology, on the process of international consultations.”
He said that the country’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was keen on “repositioning India as a constructive player” in climate change talks.
“We did not cause the problem of global warming but we are going to be part of the solution as no other country is as profoundly influenced by climate change as India,” he said.
“We need an agreement,” he said.
Ramesh’s comments came after the climate talks struck a sour note in Cancun after Japan was accused of weakening the campaign for a post-2012 treaty for controlling emissions.
“Japan seems to have announced that it would walk out of the talks,” Ramesh said.
India is pushing a global monitoring system in which countries accounting for over one percent of the world’s greenhouse gases report their actions and emissions to the United Nations every three years.
Right now, only industrialised nations report their greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations.
Participants in Cancun are meeting against the backdrop of a report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization saying that the year 2010 will be one of the warmest ever, at the end of a record-breaking decade.
