India committed to achieve net-zero emission by 2070: Jitendra Singh

Berlin: Reiterating India’s commitment to environment and climate cause, Minister of State (MoS) in PMO Dr Jitendra Singh said that Government has launched Nation Green Hydrogen Energy mission and several other initiatives to achieve net zero emission by 2070, committed at COP26.

The minister stated during the 2^nd day of his visit to Germany, while holding a delegation level talks with his German counterpart Steffi Lemke, Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection in Berlin on Monday, as part of the India-Germany Inter Governmental Commissio

During the COP26 summit at Glasgow last year in November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India will achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2070.

In view of the imminent future challenges on the climate and weather, Dr Jitendra Singh expressed interest to augment our cooperation in this field including Model Development, Application of Forecasts in the renewable energy and of course use of Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning.

He mentioned that Science & Technology has been one of the strategic pillars of bilateral partnership and suggested to explore possibilities of bilateral scientific cooperation in emerging areas of Weather and Climate Research, specifically, on trends of regional climate extremes and variability of vulnerable areas including tropics and high-latitudes.

The agenda of the meeting was Adaptation to climate change, Biological diversity, Oceans and Artificial intelligence for environmental protection.

Dr Jitendra Singh conveyed to his German counterpart that Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) at Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad provides early warning information for Tsunami related hazards to the Indian Ocean rim countries.

“India has been recognized as one of the Tsunami Service Providers (TSP) under United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO-IOC) and invited Germany to make utilization of this opportunity” he added.

Dr Jitendra Singh noted with satisfaction that India is working towards Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA) in the Makran region through UNESCO-IOC and funded by UNESCAP, where German experts and institutions are part of this initiative.

For strengthening mutual collaboration between Ministry of Earth Sciences  institutions and German scientific/ research agencies, Dr Jitendra Singh also proposed to develop bilateral cooperation in areas of-Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessments, Early detection of tsunamis including ‘atypical tsunami’ generated by the under-sea landslides triggered by earthquakes, Geodynamic modelling of Earth’s sub-surface for sub-marine landslides.

For bilateral cooperation in Ocean Exploration, Dr Jitendra Singh highlighted that the Blue Economy is an important dimension of Vision New India and proposed joint collaboration in areas like Coastal Marine Spatial Planning and Tourism, Marine fisheries, aquaculture, and fish processing, Coastal and deep-sea mining and offshore energy.

Steffi Lemke, German Environment Minister reciprocated the proposal and briefed on German advancement in these areas and agreed to work out new collaboration.