India very important player in climate talks: US

Lima, Dec 11: Terming India as a "very important player" in the climate change negotiations, the US has said it is not involved in any agreement on climate with India ahead of President Obama's Republic Day visit to New Delhi.

"India's obviously a very important player. We don't have anything in the works of the kind that we were involved with China," US State Department Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern said referring to the recent US-China climate agreement. Expressing hope for a "productive" meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stern said the US had done a lot of bilateral work on energy with India.

Stern noted that the US-China agreement did not come to fruition overnight. It took several months of bilateral talks to produce it and that there is no such process going on at the moment with India, he said. He also said that US Secretary of State John Kerry will be arriving in Lima as part of a larger regional trip and will spend a few hours at the COP. He is not expected to play any role in the negotiations and that Kerry's visit was slated earlier and not in response to the slow progress of talks, he said.

The draft elements text is "mostly done" and will certainly pass on to the next Co-Chairs of the committee, he said. Stern said the US position on Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) was to "not make it complicated" and just ask countries for a limited set of information like types of gasses covered, sectors of the economy and any assumptions made.

The US will not support a proposal that calls for a different sets of requirements for developed and developing countries based on 1992 Kyoto Protocol categorisations, he said. India strongly pitched for finance and technology for developing nations from developed countries to deal with challenges posed by climate change. The need for finance and technology support as a key element under the "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions" (INDCs) cannot be overstated, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Prakash Javadekar said yesterday. The climate talks are aiming to establish the draft text of a new international climate change agreement to be signed by all countries at the next major talks in Paris in 2015.

PTI