India hopes to summit climate targets before Paris summit

India has assured the international community that it is in advanced stages of formulating its post-2020 climate change targets and hopes to submit them to the UN ahead of the high-level conference in Paris later this year.
"Our domestic preparations for formulating the INDCs (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) are at an advanced stage and we hope to submit the same well-ahead of the Paris COP (Conference of the Parties)," Joint Secretary (Climate Change) in the Indian Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change, Ravi Shankar Prasad said at a high-level event on climate change here on June 29.
Prasad said India has gone through an extensive process of multi-stakeholder consultations, which included the central ministries, provincial governments, civil society, think-tanks and media in the process of formulating the INDCs.

Assuring of India's readiness to contribute and play its due role in reaching a meaningful, equitable and effective agreement at Paris, Prasad said "we strongly believe that developing countries can do much more if they are enabled in their efforts by provision of finance, technology development and transfer and capacity building support from developed countries.
"Such an international compact of cooperation would help us tread a path that is urgently required to address climate change and its adverse effects," he said.
The Paris agreement must also deliver on an ambitious pre-2020 outcome under the Convention and this will help build trust and confidence in the process leading upto the post-2020 period.

"Unless we take ambitious actions now and upto 2020, our tasks in the post-2020 period would become much more than what may be required. And we believe that the developed countries have take the lead both in terms of mitigation and concomitantly in terms of providing financial, technological and capacity-building support to developing countries to enable them take more ambitious actions," he said.

China and South Korea submitted their post-2020 climate change targets, a move welcomed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who said with these two submissions, there are now post-2020 climate change targets from over 40 countries that together represent over 60 per cent of global emissions.

"The INDCs submitted today and since March offer a floor, and not a ceiling for ambition, and are critical for building momentum and trust on the road to COP-21 in Paris," the UN Chief said as he encouraged other countries to accelerate the preparation and submission of their INDCS.
He noted that a key step to reaching a universal and meaningful climate agreement in Paris is the "timely submission" of INDCs by all countries well in advance of Paris conference at the end of the year.