30 August, 2009 - Climate change is not about science, it is about economic growth and politics, according to the centre for science and environment (CSE) in New Delhi, India.

The director of CSE, Sunita Narain, said that climate change is related to carbon dioxide and other emissions, and in turn related to economic growth. “It’s directly linked to economic growth; so, when you report climate change, you’re reporting economic growth,” she said.

CSE defines climate change as the changing trend of changing weather. “It’s not only about rising temperature but about the extreme and variable weather events,” the director said to some 115 media personnel from South Asia, who had gathered at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on Thursday for a two-day briefing workshop on climate change.

Although, industrialised countries contribute more to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, they experience less of an impact than developing countries, said environmentalists. The south Asian region is the worst hit by climate change, according to them.

Experts on climate change said that this is because developing countries, which are dependent on monsoon, have less capacity to cope with changing climate.

They emphasised collaboration among countries and collective effort in addressing the issue. “The impact of climate change is more on us. We’re victims of climate change for things we haven’t done,” said the associate director of CSE Chandra Bushan.

This can be addressed through negotiations among countries, they said. Reduction of emissions by countries mainly responsible for climate change is the only alternative to address the impact of climate change, said the special envoy of the Indian prime minister on climate change, Shyam Saran.

“The minimum requirement to prevent irreversible climate change is to reduce emissions at least 40 percent by developed countries,” said Shyam Saran.

CSE’s associate director, Chandra Bushan, said that emissions could be reduced by using renewable energy instead of fossil fuel and by increasing the efficiency of cars. Increasing forest cover, organic farming, and grassland management, replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent tubes and by making nuclear energy more affordable, could also reduce it.

But experts said that reducing emissions still remains a challenge, because solutions are very expensive, even for the developed world. Negotiations on reducing emissions have come to a standstill.

Citing an example on affordability of options to reduce emission, Sunita Narain said that a unit of electricity today costs Nu 3.50, while a unit of solar energy costs about Nu 17. “The industrialised world has still not learnt the first lesson of climate change – to share atmospheric space, so growth can be shared equally,” she said.