(a) whether Asia-Pacific climate meeting was held recently at Sydney;
(b) if so, whether India was a party to the meeting;
(c) if so, the details of discussions held;
(d) the decision taken and the action plan evolved therein; and
(e) the response/obligations of India thereto?
MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT AND FORESTS (SHRI NAMO NARAIN MEENA)
(a) & (b) The inaugural Ministerial Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean
Development and Climate, to which India is also a party, was held on 11-12 January 2006
at Sydney.
(c) to (e) Along with India, the other Partner countries to this Partnership are Australia,
China, Japan, South Korea and the United States of America. The objective of this Partnership
is to create a voluntary, non-legally binding framework for international cooperation to
facilitate the development, diffusion, deployment, and transfer of existing, emerging and
longer term cost effective, cleaner, and more efficient technologies and practices among
the Partners. Towards this end, the Charter, which describes the purposes, organization,
functions and other matters related to this Partnership, and the Work Plan, which focuses
on power generation and distribution, as well as key industry sectors of our economies
and establishes eight public- private sector Task Forces, were adopted in the meeting.
The task forces are in the areas of cleaner fossil energy, renewable energy and distributed
generation, power generation and transmission, steel, aluminum, cement, coal mining and
buildings and appliances. Each Task Force is expected to formulate detailed action plans
outlining both immediate and medium-term specific actions, including possible `flagship
projects and relevant indicators of progress and also to define the current state of
technology in terms of cost, performance, market share and barriers. The Partners had
agreed to a sort of time bound schedule of activities and to review the progress of the
work under this Partnership at the Ministerial level from time to time. India had shown
interest in participating in the activities of all the eight task forces and would be
co-chairing the task forces on Steel and Coal Mining.