Govt. acts on UN reports on climate change, sets up panel

New Delhi (PTI): Acting on UN reports during the outgoing year on threats of impending climate change, the Government set up a high-level panel to tackle the impact of global warming.

The first report of the Nobel award winning Inter-Governmental Penal on Climate Change (IPCC) rang the alarm bells predicting that temperatures in the next century are expected to go up by 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Centigrade and that India, along with developing countries, will face a serious shortage of water and threat to food security.

In the midst of a grim scenario painted by IPCC, a council headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will act as a think-tank to decide on India's future course of action in the short term as well as after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

A three-member sub-committee to be headed by Nobel laureate and IPCC Chief R K Pachauri will submit its report by early next year. The report will assume significance globally as India has been rated as the 4th largest carbon emitter after the United States, Australia and China.

India's per capita emissions of GHG, a formulation connected to climate change, is 1/20th of USA, 1/15 of EU-15 and 1/12th of Japan.

With a 17 per cent share of the global population, the emissions from India are not high in percentage terms, but they have already started showing their immediate effects on the weather, experts say.

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