India has taken the first step towards developing a national plan to tackle the effects of global warming. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s new Council on Climate held its first meeting in a bid to come up with a national agenda.

As far as the science of climate change was concerned, there were no discordant voices in the 21-member council, which included ministers, environmentalists, industrialists and journalists.

Now, there will be a plan but no emission targets despite mounting international pressure. Instead, the plan would focus on ways to increase energy efficiency without undermining economic growth. It will also have a comprehensive negotiating strategy ahead of a key United Nations climate change meeting in December.

The Prime Minister expressed concern at the glaciers melting in the Himalayas. “Our food security comes from largely irrigated areas of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh whose rivers are fed by glacier melting in the Himalayas,” he said. Nearly 1.5 billion people live in the basins of rivers that rise in the Greater Himalayas. “There is a gap in our understanding of the Himalayas and we need to build a knowledge-based partnership of affected countries to manage and develop the Himalayan region to bring economic prosperity, peace, social harmony and environmental sustainability to the region,” he said. He said as a concrete first step, India had to identify knowledge institutions within the country that the people could mandate for an agenda related to the Himalayas as well as identify other institutions with which they could collaborate in knowledge-sharing.

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