Danish PM to discuss climate change during visit to India

New Delhi, Sep.10 (ANI): The Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, will arrive here on Friday on a daylong working visit to India to speed up negotiations on a climate deal ahead of a key summit to be held in Copenhagen between December 7 and 18.

Rasmussen will meet with his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh and the UN's top climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who is chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Rasmussen will meet with Dr. Singh at Hyderabad House at 12 p.m. The two sides will have delegation-level talks after which an agreement on environment cooperation will be signed.

In the afternoon, he will deliver a speech on "Green Economy" organized in cooperation with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at the Hotel Oberoi.

He will emplane for Vienna on Saturday morning.

On Tuesday, at the start of the Nordic Climate Solutions conference gathering decision-makers and businessmen in Copenhagen, Rasmussen said the negotiations were progressing slowly "in all areas."

"It's very difficult because these are not just issues concerning climate," but also economy and technology, he said.

"Take the example of India, where I will meet the Indian prime minister who wants to gives his population of one billion some prosperity and who therefore doesn't want to commit to restrictive reductions unless the world brings new technology to his country," Rasmussen said. (ANI)