New Delhi, Feb 6 (Inditop.com) A day after it received Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s backing, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), headed by R.K. Pachauri, Saturday got support from the European Union which offered to update its report.
“We fully support the IPCC report. The level of science and research has improved so much,” Teresa Ribera, president of the EU’s council of environment ministers, told reporters here. Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU.
Ribera, also Spanish Secretary of State for Climate Change, said her country and the EU were ready to offer their expertise in updating the methodology of the IPCC report.
Ribera also expressed the EU’s support for the Copenhagen accord and stressed that all countries need to work together to come out with “a transparent and credible” global treaty to combat climate change at Mexico.
The EU has pledged its commitment to cut greenhouse gases and help by way of mitigation and financing, she said.
The IPCC has been facing flak since revelations last month that its landmark Fourth Assessment Report mistakenly predicted that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 as a result of global warming.
Inaugurating the three-day Sustainable Development global conference, the first such meet afer the UN meet in Copenhagen in December last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Friday that India had full confidence in the IPCC process and its leadership.
Pitching for a legally binding global treaty to curb global warming, the prime ministers of Norway, Greece, Finland, Slovenia and Bhutan, too, joined Manmohan Singh in backing embattled UN climate change panel chief R.K. Pachauri, saying global warming has the potential to melt polar ice and lead to a rise in sea levels.
The European Commission has formally notified the EU’s willingness to be associated with the Copenhagen accord and submitted for information the EU’s established greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets for 2020.
These consist of a unilateral commitment to reduce the EU’s overall emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels, and a conditional offer to increase its cut to 30 percent provided other major emitters agree to take on their fair share of a global reduction effort.
