Chennai, Feb 17 (IANS): BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) nations Saturday urged developed countries to contribute their share to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) at the earliest and voiced their opposition to sectoral targets for emission reduction and mere trading in carbon certificates.
At the 14th Ministerial Meeting on Climate Change, the four also stressed that developed nations must take the lead and scale up ambition not just in mitigation of emission but also in adaptation, finance, technology transfer and capacity building.
Speaking to reporters at the end of the two-day closed-door meeting held here for the first time, India's Environment and Forests Minister Jayanthi Natarajan said: "The meeting stressed that there should be clear roadmap to raise finance (short and long term). The capitalisation of fund is important and how it should be done."
She said the fund should have a corpus of around $30 billion by now but has only $7 billion.
"The fund corpus could be a mix of public and private money but majorly public fund should be the source. We should explore various options of funding," said China's National Development and Reform Commission chairman Xie Zhenhua.
He said the other issue about GCF is the future commitment of the developed nations to the fund and there should be a clear roadmap on raising money.
The ministers of the four nations reiterated the importance of achieving the goal of providing $100 billion per year by 2020.
Opposing sectoral emission targets proposed by the developed nations, Natarajan said: "There should be no prescriptive policies. The aviation tax imposed by European Union (EU) is one outcome of such sectoral targets."
She said India is of the view that there should be no prescriptive polices in the field of agriculture.
At the meeting, BASIC nations, expressing disappointment over the low level of mitigation ambition pledged by the developed nations, hoped that they would raise their ambition level in 2014 in consonance with science and their historical responsibility.
Queried whether the non-developed nations can put a pressure on the developed nations to reduce their emissions into the atmosphere, Natarajan said various groups of countries - BASIC, G77 and others - collectively urge the developed countries to bring down their emissions.
Citing the commitment of developing countries including the BASIC nations to mitigate the climate change, the meeting also urged the developed countries to come forward and reciprocate the gesture and efforts.
The meeting also noted the recommendation of the BASIC exerts to organise an international conference on scientific and technical aspects of black carbon/coal and the need for further work for enhancement of knowledge and understanding of the potential role of black carbon in global warming.
The meeting welcomed the offer by South Africa to host the 15th BASIC Ministerial Meeting in the second quarter of 2013.
The others who participated in the meeting are Carlos Augusto Klink, secretary for climate change and environment quality in Brazil's environment ministry and Alfred James Wills, deputy director general, in South Africa's environmental affairs department.