The Indian prime minister and the Chinese president have pledged to cooperate in tackling climate change, and in a joint statement have urged rich countries to honour their financial commitments. Chinaand India are respectively the first and third biggest greenhouse gas emitters. During Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s visit to China in May, they released a joint statement announcing their commitment towards greater cooperation in the battle against climate change. The two nations decided to strengthen their partnership in clean energy technologies, energy conservation and efficiency and sustainable transportation, and stressed that they are “undertaking ambitious actions domestically on combating climate change … despite the enormous scale of their challenges in terms of social and economic development and poverty eradication”. In the statement, India and China call on developed countries to enhance their efforts to reduce global carbon emissions by raising their pre-2020 climate goals, and especially urge them to keep their promise to provide finance, technology and other needed support to developing countries, thus helping them reduce their own emissions. In fact, wealthy countries have committed to provide $100 billion per year by 2020 to emerging countries, but so far thefunding has been slow in coming. China and India have not submitted their plans to cut carbon emissions (the so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) to the UN yet, but they say they will do so in time for the global climate summit that will be held in Paris in December. The United States and China – the world’s two main emitters – have recently agreed to set stronger limits on carbon emissions starting from 2025, and after this plan has been issued India has been urged to make its own commitments too; however, Modi has highlighted that the country can’t commit to emissions cuts at the moment, as it needs to industrialize and eradicate poverty, and said it will focus on fostering the use of clean energies. In relation to this matter, he reaffirmed his intention to quintuple India’s renewable energy capacity by 2022. The gLAWcal Team POREEN project Friday, 15 May 2015 (Source: Guardian)