Prime Minister said India was not only on track to achieve its pledge of reducing the emission intensity of its GDP by 20-25% from the 2005-levels by 2020, but the country is also on track to meet the 2030 nationally-determined contributions.
Speaking while inaugurating the 2018 edition of The Energy and Resources Institute’s (TERI) World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS 2018), the prime minister focused on some of the key initiatives of the government, including Make in India. He said, “People in India have waited too long for access to modern amenities and means of development. We have committed to complete this task sooner than anticipated. However, we have also said that we will do all this in a cleaner and greener way.”
The PM also called for greater international co-operation and expressed his views by saying, “successful climate action needs access to financial resources and technology. Technology can help countries like India develop sustainably and enable the poor to benefit from it.”
Dr Harsh Vardhan, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, said, “We have to accept that climate change is one of the biggest threats to the survival of human civilisation and that development with a human face is the need of the hour. ”
Ashok Chawla, Chairman, TERI, said, “We believe that the perspectives and partnerships emerging from this summit will strengthen the global effort to tackle environmental damage. This summit aims to make sustainable development a universally-shared goal. In an unequal world, the impact of climate change will disproportionately affect the large number of people living in poverty.”
The theme for WSDS 2018, the annual flagship forum of TERI, was ‘Partnerships for a Resilient Planet’ and it brought together global leaders in the development, energy and environment sectors which includes academia, civil society, corporations and organisations on a unified platform to identify opportunities for consensus, collaboration, technology acquisition, resource sharing and financing, along with policies which promote the accelerated uptake of cleaner technologies and of sustainable consumer behaviour.
