Global Warming: Funding sought
The South Asia Workshop on "Adaptation to Climate Change for Agriculture Productivity" has called for international funding support for developing countries to go in for adaptation strategies to mitigate the effect of global warming.
The three-day workshop, sought public research on adaptation at both international and national levels. The workshop was organised jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and the United Nations Environment Programme.
The workshop emphasised the need for implementing an action-based approach to adaptation for climate change. The recommendations said, "in order to mainstream adaptation in policy and action, there is an urgent requirement for development of a model framework/guidelines on adaptation, based on experience of the countries already engaged in this process.''
Most of the countries were already on the path of adaptation. The proposed framework/guidelines would need to be based on the best practices and socio-economic considerations. The major components of such an approach should be a cafeteria of programmes and projects that different governments could adopt suiting to their local situations, the workshop noted.
It should provide momentum to measures already being taken by different governments with additionalities to combat climate change. Such framework/guidelines should provide for incentive structure for those promoting adaptation like Clean Development Mechanism. It should have a component of capacity building programmes for different governments/agencies involved in the process. It should provide for a convergence building mechanism with networking of international, regional and national institutions.
The framework/guidelines should have space for documentation of best practices and monitoring and evaluation of adaptation process. The workshop noted that since no single discipline can address the entire gamut of issues related to adaptation to climate change, this had to be on holistic farming systems approach, not single crop or single discipline based. Former Minister and member Planning Commission, Som Pal, said the success of the mitigating effects of climate change would be to embark upon setting up institutional framework and evolve guidelines and funding pattern which could be the clearing house of information.
He said that all the conditions set at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at Marackesh had not been fulfilled resulting in unfair, inequitable regime against developing countries. Developed countries had gone on increasing subsidies to their farming community thereby making exports of agricultural products from developing countries difficult.
The Minister of State for Agriculture, Hukukdeo Narayan Yadav, said India had the tradition of maintaining a balance in nature and returning to it whatever was utilised. The world should learn from this.
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