Category: Environment and Climate

By Mallika Sarabhai / DNA

If someone were to ask you, which route you preferred while travelling from Delhi to Chennai, the options being via Jammu and via Chandigarh, what would your response be? If someone asked a poor village whether she preferred milk with four per cent fat to that with three per cent, what would her answer be? If someone asked a friend whether, in case he developed cancer, he would prefer cancer of the lungs or the stomach, what would his answer be?

Some questions are stupid, not because their answers will be stupid, but because the framing of the question itself is faulty. The current backslapping and self-congratulatory award functions organised by the "green" building lobby and the institutions that certify the depth of the greenness of the buildings, remind me of questions like these.

In a landmark for carbon financing in India, the municipal corporation of Greater Mumbai has earned Rs 26 crore for the scientific closure of a garbage dumping ground.

The cheque from the Asia Carbon Fund of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is an advance for future delivery of carbon credits. The money essentially is for the capture and combustion of methane gas emanating from the dump which results in a substantial reduction of greenhouse emissions. Before giving the money though, the ADB had the project scrutinised by independent validators.

Carbon credit consultants say the deal is one of the largest Carbon advances under the Clean Development Mechanism to a municipal corporation. "We hope to earn a total of Rs 73 crores from the Gorai dumping ground carbon credits, which would be Rs 11 crores above the entire cost of the project,” said additional municipal commissioner R A Rajeev, who drove the project from start to finish.

By Jacob Scherr

At the United Nations Summit on Climate Change this morning, President Obama spoke about the importance of assisting developing countries on adaptation and technology.  He also reiterated the need for developing countries with rapidly growing emissions to "commit to strong measures at home and agree to stand behind those commitments just as the developed nations must stand behind their own."  Over the last several days, one of those nations – India – has made a number of dramatic moves in that direction.

India recently announced it would quantify the emissions cuts it will make under its ambitious National Action Plan on Climate Change (see my colleague Anjali Jaiswal’s blog.).  Last Friday, India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh explained in a talk at Columbia University that: "I am telling the world, because climate change is important for me… I am prepared to take on, voluntarily, unilaterally, mitigation actions as part of a domestic legislative agenda."