India looking at bringing together broad-based coalition for disaster resilient infra: Akbaruddin

India, a leader in the International Solar Alliance, is looking at bringing together the developed and developing nations for another coalition to focus on disaster resilient infrastructure to help nations build better after natural calamities, the country's top envoy to the UN has said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be among the first set of speakers at UN Secretary General's high-level Climate Action Summit in the UN General Assembly chamber on September 23 along with Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, President of Marshall Islands Hilda Heine and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Over 63 countries have been invited to speak at the Summit, which will demonstrate solutions by governments, the private sector and civil society to reduce emissions and build climate resilience and adaptation.

Immediately after this session, Modi will address the first-ever High-level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage, which will launch new efforts to provide access for all to affordable, inclusive and resilient health systems.

On Modi's agenda for the Climate Action Summit, India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin said in response to a question by PTI that India is increasingly talking about addressing issues of e-mobility. "Again, this will be a big issue because it has factors relating to use of fossil fuels."
"So we're looking at another coalition of this, which cuts across borders, which will look at infrastructure. So the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure is a coalition that is in the making, which will bring about some of the G-20 countries, some of the developing countries who are not in the G-20, but who perhaps are exposed to the travails and the vagaries of nature, and their infrastructure gets destroyed very quickly, when there are these huge catastrophic climatic events."
"So our effort is to see if we can bring together this coalition, because climate action also requires us to build better, and to build best at the beginning so that we don't have to build better when there is a crisis. So this is another element of a broad-based coalition that we are working on, and which will be announced by the Prime Minister, as he talks about India's engagement on climate change at this summit."
Akbaruddin said each of these themes are of importance to India not only as a foreign policy issue, but as an issue that "we can learn as well as explain in terms of our domestic priorities. All of these have a resonance way beyond what resonance would be for other things for an ordinary Indian, for people who want a better life for themselves."