India gets pat on back for its green tech plan

Nitin Sethi, TNN 11 December 2009, 03:08am IST
Source: TOI

COPENHAGEN: India on Thursday got all-round credit for suggesting a proposal and forging a consensus on a deal to share new green technologies.

Even as talks on the issue of financing technologies and other actions got stalled, the Indian delegation was able to forge near complete consensus on the formation of Climate Innovation Centres which would be akin to the CGIAR model created during Green Revolution to develop and share crop varieties.

The innovation centres would be a collaborative effort by all countries in terms of both funds and capacities to create new green technologies. The rights over these new technologies would be shared by all countries that contribute to the work. the CGIAR model created during the food crisis in the 1970s had led to large scale deployment of hybrid and high productivity seeds across the poor world.

Its authors — primarily the Bureau of Energy Efficiency and the power ministry — have pinned hopes on similar breakthrough on the clean tech front through the innovation centres.

While the details of the technology deal would still take a couple of days to be finally fleshed out, the talks on this front over the last four days have been the most fruitful. "We should ideally get most of the details sorted out before the high level rounds begin next week. It now seems we can at least have a deal on technology even if other things get stuck," an Indian negotiator said.

Sources said the key issue that would remain to be thrashed out towards the end would include the list of technologies that would get financial support.This issue has got stuck with negotiations on the finance issue getting completely jammed. The industrialised countries have not even been able to come up with numbers that add up to the $10 billion informally offered by them.

Worse still, sources said the negotiations have not been able to move on creating a structure and formula by which money will be collected, from whom it would be collected and which countries shall benefit from the funds.

"We expect this would be the last of the four pillars to be built up, the others being mitigation action, adaptation and technology. The issue of financing the other three pillars is obviously linked so the chances are that the size of the pot would be left to the last to be sorted out," said a G77 negotiator. He pointed out that developed countries were dragging their feet on the finance issue as they were extremely reluctant to provide public funds to poor and developing states.