One clear strand of opinion – especially prevalent among environmental campaigners and India’s strong NGO community – is that Copenhagen was a disaster for the world’s and India’s poor, who are most vulnerable to climate change. A typical reaction is that of the Centre for Science and Environment, one of India’s leading environmental thinktanks.

At the same time, the Indian government has come under fire from those who believe it went too far in announcing, on the eve of Copenhagen, a voluntary target to reduce India’s "emissions intensity" – the amount of CO2 emitted per dollar of economic output – by 20-25% below 2005 levels by 2020. According to these critics, India should have made no such commitments given its poverty levels, its very low carbon emissions per capita and the historical responsibility of the developed countries, who have failed to meet their own emission reduction targets.

Other domestic voices – admittedly a minority – have praised the Indian government for showing a willingness to be part of the solution even though India bears no historical responsibility, thus playing a constructive role in negotiations.

By far the most interesting and encouraging sign for me, however, is that India is not standing still waiting to see what emerges from the Copenhagen Accord. In the absence of a strong and binding international agreement, action on climate change will have to be driven by domestic benefits – and there’s every sign of this happening in India. Earlier this week the Minister for Environment (who featured in my last blog) gave a strong message to this effect.

Two impressive initiatives launched shortly before Copenhagen are the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission which aims to expand India’s solar power generation from its currently negligible level to 20,000 MW by 2022; and a new National Biomass Cookstove Initiative. The latter is truly exciting in that it promises to reduce carbon emissions whilst also tackling indoor air pollution – rated by the WHO as the third greatest risk to health in India.

There are many more examples of action, many of them from the “bottom-up” – from the private sector or local governments. It’s fertile ground for DFID cooperation, since we aim to put development and poverty reduction at the heart of our work on climate change. Improving the health of the poor, for example, is one of the main objectives of DFID overall in India. Last Wednesday I was chatting with Sabina Barnes, one of DFID’s team of Health Advisers here, who helped organise a conference a few months back on climate change and health. The conversation turned to the new cookstove initiative and how this could contribute to better health, particularly in rural areas. Sabina immediately saw the links, and we agreed to stay in touch on this issue.

The annual march to Parliament of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations

Finally, a word about the photograph. I took this at the annual march to Parliament of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations, representing India’s former “Untouchables” and other socially-excluded people. It was just before Copenhagen – and for the first time ever, “climate justice” featured as one of their key demands. I wondered whether this was a sign of things to come, and if the voice of the poor themselves will start to be heard in the debate now hotting up.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Copenhagen wasn’t a roaring success, reading the media reports that have come out in the last few weeks. To some extent, that’s true – there isn’t yet a legally binding treaty, and there are a number of key issues that the international community hasn’t been able to agree upon. After all, the UN process works so that all 192 countries have to agree to decisions by consensus – so if just one country isn’t happy, a decision doesn’t fly.

Upstream water diversion pond for refurbished 105kW micro hydro plant near Kibuye, Rwanda

But the meeting did deliver the Copenhagen Accord. The Accord – so far signed by a group representing 49 countries – agreed that the international community would aim to keep global warming to two degrees; agree on ‘fast-start’ funding of $10bn per year to 2012, rising to $100bn of climate finance per year by 2020; and firm up national emissions reduction offers by the end of January 2010.

Turbine and generator unit manned by locally-trained operators

And there were many other things going on alongside the main negotiations, with some unsung but important steps forward during the two weeks that were Copenhagen. One of the big bits of news for the UK was that a new fund was launched to support the deployment of renewable energy in low income countries.

Over $260 million has been pledged by five countries (UK, Netherlands, US, Norway and Switzerland) to the new Scaling-up Renewable Energy Program (SREP). The new fund is part of the $6bn Climate Investment Funds, which are administered by the World Bank.

The programme will support at least five low income countries to transform their energy sectors, making them more accessible, reliable and sustainable, and so contributing to economic growth.

SREP will seek to:

• help developing world governments to scale-up the building of wind, geothermal, biomass and small hydroelectric power plants by offering practical, financial and policy support;
• make investing in renewable energy less risky by underwriting the additional capital costs associated with renewable energy; and
• encourage private sector investment in renewables by providing initial start-up funding.

The UK is contributing £50m ($82m) to SREP, as part of the UK’s commitment to provide ‘fast-start’ climate finance before 2012. This contribution will see the UK become the largest donor to this global initiative to help boost the renewable energy sector in low-income countries.

So there’s plenty of reason that those two weeks in December can go down in the record books as Hopenhagen. It wasn’t the end of the process by any means, but it certainly took us a big step forward.

Low energy bulbs are one way individuals can reduce their carbon emissions. (Credit: Joe Colburn)

In discussing the ongoing climate conversation I'm having with my brother in my last two blogs, I've talked about the evidence behind the need to tackle climate change, and about why we need to assist developing countries to grow their economies and reduce poverty in a low carbon way.

But my brother's question that kicked off my musings was about why a relative handful of people in developed countries would bother to reduce their own individual emissions.

In the scenario I set out in my last post, for developing countries to limit their emissions to 2.5 tonnes per capita, developed countries would have to reduce their own emissions to zero. That's a pretty massive ask: the UK at the moment emits 8.94  tonnes per capita. 

My brother's right that we can't meet the climate change targets we must set ourselves by a privileged few lowering their meat consumption. The biggest effects will come from governments committing to serious cuts at Copenhagen, and from a real change in, for example, how industry works, how we meet our energy needs, and how we travel.  

But individuals emit a significant proportion of developed countries' emissions.  In the UK, more than 40 per cent of CO2 emissions come directly from what individuals do – for example, using electricity in the home and driving cars. So we all need to take responsibility too. There are lots of great campaigns around to help us do that – you can sign up to reduce your emissions by 10% by 2010 and the UK government has a dedicated website to help. 

After all these debates and our protracted question and answer session, my brother proved last night that he understands where I'm coming from – and is a mighty fine brother. I went to his place for dinner, expecting to have to swap one of my weekend meat-eating days. But no. He'd been to the local Chinese supermarket to buy tofu, and he cooked up a delicious vegan feast.

Brotherly challenge: managed to get him along to the Prove It exhibition over the weekend

As I said in my last post, my brother and I have been debating climate change through the unexpected medium of Facebook. First he asked about science; next he commented that, “A million people giving up meat to appease Mother Gaia will do nothing to offset the effect of a billion people giving up subsistence farming, and building cities and heavy industry.” 

Phew, I thought. This question's not about science, but about my day-to-day work: low carbon development. I reckon I can answer this one. 

First off, it's true that a small action by a minority in developed countries won't make the huge difference we need. And it's also true that developing countries have to be part of the solution too – one of the main things we’re pushing for this week at Copenhagen. 

If we're to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius – widely accepted as the most we can allow before things get truly dangerous – then, with the world's population set to rise to nine billion by 2050, each person needs to emit no more than two tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.  Even if developed countries reduce their emissions to zero, developing countries will still have to limit theirs to 2.5 tonnes per person to ensure we hit that stay under that limit. 

Deep in thought: my brother and I review the evidence for climate change

But at the same time, developing countries need to be able to develop and reduce poverty. Developed countries had the chance to do that – and, through developing in an industrial way, emitted the greenhouse gases that have got us to where we are today. 

So the key is assisting developing countries to avoid the same kind of high emission development – to avoid getting locked in to high carbon technologies and energy supplies – and instead to develop in a low carbon way. 

An example of low carbon development in Rwanda: Kirambo Health Center installs solar panels. Photo credit: SolarEnima

That means, for example, developing and adopting low carbon technologies, increasing energy efficiency, and building low carbon mass transport systems and buildings. And there are real opportunities in this for economies to grow: increased efficiency means savings; new green industries mean new jobs and innovation. (In fact, check out my colleague Shan’s latest blog on the low carbon development opportunities for India). The UK government works on programmes to assist developing countries in exactly these kinds of ways, such as the Climate Technology Fund and the catchily titled Scaling-up Renewable Energy Program. 

So where does that leave developed countries, and is it worth individuals making an effort to reduce their emissions, as I'm doing through eating less meat? I'll turn to that in the third of this series of blogs.

An example of high resolution sea level rise modelling now being undertaken in the Caribbean. The colours show the impact of different levels on infrastructure which help us understand our vulnerabilities and identify options to adapt. Taken from ‘An overview of modelling climate change impacts in the Caribbean with contribution from the Pacific islands’. Click for a bigger picture

People will hear from several leaders in the Caribbean - nice to see them there in force - including President of Guyana and Chairman of CARICOM, Hon Bharrat Jagdeo; Hon Stephenson King, Prime Minister of St Lucia; Hon Dean Barrow, Prime Minister of Belize. The presentations will also excitingly include the very latest projections for the region under a + 1.5°C and +2°C global warming scenario - this is literally new scientific modelling work completed in the last few months and hot off the press.

Another example showing predicted rising sea levels along a Caribbean beach. Taken from www.caribsave.org

It looks into the implications of ice sheet melt on sea level rise and the differential impacts of these warming scenarios for the Caribbean and Pacific on coral reefs, water resources and agriculture.

I must say I find it really motivating to see more and more people around me talking about climate change. Friends and colleagues are interested in knowing more. We chat about it in different ways over tea and dinner - and this is without me introducing the topic! While attending the fourth annual conference on Comprehensive Disaster Management last week held in Jamaica, PM Golding in the opening address, talked about how he only really recently got what climate change  means for his country and the region and spoke from the heart about the impacts on the poorest. The sessions I attended also brought home to me that we urgently need to do all we can to ensure we "scale up" our disaster risk management practices on the ground to help us adapt.

The talks at the UN climate summit are heated to say the least given recent walkouts. With only days left, a lot of pressure is on to find ways to solve the difficult issues and going for the most we can get. Especially when several small islands' very existence is under threat. I really am crossing all fingers and toes like many that the countries stand behind meaningful commitments they make, and follow through with measures and actions that are financially supported and that we can track real progress on the targets set.

I haven’t forgotten my promise to write more on some practical issues facing us with respect to renewable energy in the Caribbean etc... and I am doing my homework to find out more to share with you.

Cows - big methane culprits?

It’s funny, I’ve got the Copenhagen conference coming out of my ears - trying to keep up with latest developments, seeing where the sticking points are – yet one of the most interesting climate change discussions I’ve had this week was with my brother. On Facebook. Who’d have thought it?

It sounds unlikely, but it's true.  It all started when I became a weekday vegetarian a few weeks ago, for climate change reasons.  I posted something on Facebook about my confusion over whether to stop eating meat (since animals, especially cows, produce methane, which is worse still than carbon dioxide in terms of climate change ) or whether I had to include dairy (since cows produce far more methane than other animals meats), or whether swapping to soy milk was still worse (because soya production has been one of the most important causes of deforestation, and therefore climate change).

My brother – unlike me, scientifically minded, and brilliantly so – replied with a series of searching questions on the science of climate change, along with queries about the difference that individuals can make in developed and developing countries.  These three issues: the science of climate change, how the developing world can grow in a low carbon way, and the role of the developed world,  will be the subjects of my next three blogs. 

So first: the science.

Like lots of people, my brother's not a climate change denier, but does have difficulty finding the evidence in an accessible, freely available form.  He was worried, for example, that some of the research that the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] used didn't appear to have been peer-reviewed and therefore might not be of sufficient quality.  Yet the IPCC is the body we rely on as the trusted  provider of the science behind climate change, because they are made up of a wide selection of the world’s leading subjects on the matter – or to put it another way, they are the peers! He was also concerned about whether climate models can make reliable predictions.

I'm no scientist myself, but I responded to some of his questions with the Royal Society's brilliantly simple response to some of the oft-heard myths around climate change.  I've also suggested we visit the Science Museum's new Prove It exhibition , which presents all the evidence and let’s you make up your own mind. 

Will giving up weekday burgers really make an impact on climate change? Credit: Dave77459

Fine, said my brother, but still: what difference will a million people in the developed world stopping eating meat make, compared to a billion people in developing countries ceasing subsistence farming in order to develop through moving to cities and shifting their livelihoods to industry? 

Good point. Some new research suggests that among poorer countries, the percentage of people living in urban areas is expected to rise from 29.4% to 41.5% between 2010 and 2030.  For example, while the population of DRC is expected to almost double between 2005 and 2030, the population of Kinshasa is projected to increase from around 8.5m today to over 20m in 2030 and the DRC population overall become majority urban before 2035. So we’re talking about substantial changes in. 

Hmmmm……I'll try and give my perspective on these questions in the next couple of blogs.

As it happens, the other week Lord Stern – one of the protagonists of my first blog – was in Delhi, where he is well known in academic and policy circles as a longtime friend of India. On the Monday evening he delivered a public lecture to an audience of several hundred people, on the need for a global deal on climate change that is both ambitious enough to minimise the risks of catastrophic climate change, and that takes account of the deep inequity in emissions, both historically and (on a per capita basis) currently, between rich and developing countries.

I won’t go into detail about the content of Lord Stern’s lecture – his presentation is available here. But I wanted to highlight two points made by India’s Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, in his remarks following the lecture.

Jairam Ramesh is interviewed at Climate Week. Credit: Matthew McDermott

The first was that in his view, India is more vulnerable to climate change than any other country – “forget the Maldives and Bangladesh”, he said, “we are in the frontline”. He cited several reasons for this: the dependence of Indian agriculture on the vagaries of the monsoon; the crucial role played by threatened Himalayan glaciers in regulating water supply for hundreds of millions of Indians; the vulnerability of major population centres to sea level rise; and the fact that almost all of India’s considerable mineral wealth lies buried beneath forests – how to get at these without contributing to further climate change?

The story however is not simply one of vulnerability and costs – the Minister’s other really noteworthy point was that climate change also offers huge opportunities for India to become a leader in developing and supplying cleaner technologies to the rest of the world, bringing wider benefits in terms of economic prosperity and jobs. The potential scale of these opportunities is highlighted in a recent report from the UN Environment Programme which found that new investment in clean energy reached $155 billion worldwide in 2008, of which developing countries accounted for about $37bn – 27% up on 2007. If India has managed to become a world leader in information technology, why not low carbon technology?

I found the juxtaposition of these two points – vulnerability on the one hand, opportunity on the other – particularly interesting, and relevant. As I’ve heard it put by more than one person, if Martin Luther King had said “I have a nightmare”, it’s unlikely his words would have had quite the same effect!

We're working to help communities in India take a "green" path to development. Click the image for more info. Credit: DFID / Abbie Trayler-Smith

At DFID we are particularly interested in policies and investments that promote long-term economic growth and poverty reduction whilst simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It seems to me that technology is an issue which offers great potential for meeting these twin objectives; the roles of technology in addressing climate change, and of technological change in driving long term economic growth, have been long recognised.

The question is, what needs to be done to take advantage of the opportunities that Minister Ramesh talked about? Fundamentally it comes down to incentives and capacity, but the measures needed to create these will be many and varied. Many will require policy and cooperation at the international level, which is why technology is seen as a key pillar of any global climate deal. The role of supportive trade policies in the development and transfer of clean technology will also be important – when talking to the head of the UK government’s Trade Policy Unit last week I was struck by the extent to which she saw the WTO negotiations in terms of the knowledge economy, technology and innovation.

Domestically too, there is much that countries can do to position themselves to reap these opportunities. Conducive policies will be needed to support quality basic research, to enable new ideas to be commercialised as efficiently as possible on a large scale, and to improve the business environment more generally. That’s why DFID is working with InfoDev, a programme housed within the World Bank, to find ways of helping to stimulate innovation in clean technology in India. The conclusions of a recent conference bringing together technology innovators, entrepreneurs, financiers and policymakers to brainstorm ideas on how best to do this can be found in our news room.

Other parts of the UK government are also active on this issue - for example, the UK Research Councils have recently launched a joint research initiative with the Indian Department of Science and Technology on solar energy.  

As Minister Ramesh suggested, it’s an issue that really resonates with the Indian government, which has proposed setting up a network of innovation centres for clean technology, and recently hosted a major international conference on global cooperation for climate technology.

Technology innovation however is only a part of the story. There’s huge potential for already available technologies, in renewable energy for example, to be deployed on a much larger scale in ways that bring direct benefits to poor people. DFID programmes in India are also helping to demonstrate how this can be done – but I’ll leave that story for another time.

Me with the panel

Last week I participated in a panel discussion which was part of a premiere launch of the movie ‘The Burning Agenda’. This is a film, produced by Dr Owen Day from the Buccoo Reef Trust and supported by the UK government as part of their Equity campaign, to strengthen the voice of vulnerable countries like the Caribbean on the impacts of climate change they face. The film was also launched in Trinidad and Guyana last week and I am told it is now being picked up by the regional television networks, which is great. It makes an important contribution to raising public awareness here about the issue but will also do this internationally when it is shown at the upcoming Commonwealth heads meeting in Trinidad and at the Copenhagen side event that the Caribbean will host next month.

It was a great turnout and the auditorium was full. Having been part of the initial planning discussions it was a thrill now to see the final product. I sat next to Owen who was a little anxious as you can expect - hoping it was well received and that all the technical systems would run smoothly. He need not have worried. It had us all captivated from the beginning and represented the region’s perspective very well - from all levels - with views from President Jagdeo and Prime Minster Manning to those of a nutmeg farmer in Grenada and rice farmer in Guyana who have suffered tremendous losses due to recent disasters but could also share what current climate change issues they face. Comments from BP's executive director, on the role of the private sector, was also encouraging.

Two featured speakers in the movie were on the panel - Dr Ulric Trotz, who is the Scientific adviser for Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre and Dr Leonard Nurse, local noble prize laureate and member of the scientific team of the IPCC. I felt very humbled to be in their company. They make such a valuable contribution and speak very well. Time for discussion was not long enough to deal with a complex subject like this - but a good range of questions were shared nevertheless.

One person told me that the most interesting quote for the evening for them was the comparison of the carbon footprint of a vegetarian in a small car to a meat eater walking to work. This was given by the member of the audience after reading the BBC interview with Lord Stern on the high methane contribution of cattle to greenhouse gas emissions.

Questions also covered the region’s hopes for Copenhagen and how critical the US was to a meaningful agreement - to the inspiring voice of a young 11 year old boy asking us what he can do to help - to changes that can be made at the policy level to encourage those who are keen to do their part like install energy efficient devices in a home but are finding it expensive to do so. This obviously only scratched the surface of the debate but I really hope it continues whenever it can and everywhere. I must congratulate the British High Commission staff in Bridgetown for an excellent event.

Life guard hut - complete with solar panel

In grabbing a much needed juice afterwards, I was chatting to the general manager of the National Conservation Commission, Keith Neblett who told me about the solar panel that had just been installed at Rockley beach on the lifeguard hut to run their PA system which proved to be an easy but very practical solution to power issues they have at the beach. I thought I must check it out and have inserted a picture for you here as there cannot be too many of them around the world.  I am really enjoying finding out more about the adaptation challenges but also the opportunities a climate smart and low carbon and energy efficient development pathway provides. As I investigate these oppportunities further it is like an invisible gate has opened and I am discovering things in the most unusual ways…but more about that next time.

Map of the Caribbean Islands - click for a bigger pciture

I work as the climate change adviser for the DFID Caribbean office. I am based in our regional office in Barbados as part of our Tackling risks to growth team. I have been working in the Caribbean for over eight years on issues like water resource management and now disaster risk reduction and climate change. I used to work in southern Africa, so my life journey means I have moved from a very water scarce region to places that have a rainy season for several months of the year!

Although I see beautiful blue aquamarine water and sandy beaches on my way to work – ahh the tough life you would say – the reality is that the islands here are facing extremely difficult challenges and decisions about coastal planning and future water supply when they look at the predicted impacts of increasing sea level rise, and what it means if it gets even hotter or we frequently lose crops because they are wiped out regularly by heavy wind or bad storms.

While reading a press article this week to mark International day for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Executive Director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, Jeremy Collymore, pointed out that our region was the second most prone to hazards in the world. This reminded me of the staggering stats about losses suffered by the region since I have lived here. In 2004 damage in Grenada by Hurricane Ivan was estimated at 212% GDP. In 2005 Guyana lost 60% of GDP due to floods. And just last year four tropical storms one after the other in Haiti caused damages and losses of around 15% GDP. This kind of economic setback takes a really long time to recover from and climate change predictions say the situation will be made even worse. Talk about salt in a wound.

So then you understand the region's tough stance at the international negotiations - given that they are already struggling to cope with present day climate and what the predictions look like, they want no more than a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature – this is an issue of survival for all small island states and low lying coastal areas around the globe - where relocation for some is already an unavoidable future reality.

I get excited by my work in the region because there are some excellent home grown policy platforms to build on. It was really encouraging to see all heads of state endorse the Regional Framework for Achieving Development Resilient to Climate Change (PDF) in June this year and the 2007-2012 Comprehensive Disaster Management Strategy (PDF) that is much more results based. There are adaptation pilot projects now underway, global funds coming in to help scale up adaptation efforts and already quite a lot of progress has been made around the planning and capacity building stages for adaptation through work of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre. We now need a clear vision of what success will look like and accelerated action, but I do not underestimate the challenges like for example working effectively across over 20 states and the fact that we are now being hit very hard by the recession.

Some of the topics that I am curious about that come to mind to blog about are

• the excellent and widespread use of solar in Barbados homes - but I want to know why  it hasn’t caught on in rest of region?
• the only Clean Development Mechanism project in the region – a wind farm in Jamaica. And the bottlenecks around this finance source
• the ambition to become a carbon neutral regional destination by 2015 (before Maldives who say they will achieve that by 2019)
• the latest on geothermal potential, energy efficiency improvements  and low carbon development


Parrot fish. Photo credit: micheleart

• or my recent discovery of how brilliant the parrotfish are (see the picture). They say they are like a toothbrush for dental health - the magic ingredient to helping coral recover after being damaged, which is really important when the Caribbean has the largest proportion of corals in high extinction risk categories.

Wow, I was really nervous as this is my first ever blog post, but now it has me going…

This blog features as part of Blog Action Day and the Act on Copenhagen campaign

Bjorn Lomborg. Credit: Urban Mixer

If someone had suggested to me six or seven years ago that I would end up working on climate change, I would have taken it with a pinch of salt. If I thought much about the issue at all I would probably have been in the Bjorn Lomborg camp – the lauded and vilified (in equal measure) author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Surely the predictions must be exaggerated a tiny bit by the green lobby groups? Surely there were more pressing priorities to spend money on, meeting basic needs in the here and now? I remember voicing these doubts in front of well-intentioned people brought in to tell us why we should take climate change so seriously. 

Admitting to this is a little embarrassing frankly, in view of my current job. There are so many committed people who have worked on the subject for years and really earned their credentials. Am I merely jumping on the climate change bandwagon? It’s a fair question. 

Sir Nicholas Stern speaking at the DFID Conference. Credit: Geoff Crawford

The truth is that my intellectual transformation began some years ago. I date it to 2006 when I read the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, led by the then-Chief Economist to the British Government, Sir Nicholas Stern. This book addressed the big questions that had been bugging me, considered the costs, the benefits, the risks and uncertainties associated with climate change, and did so dispassionately. I believe Sir Nick is on record as saying he had no views about climate change before he started work on the Stern Review. That, to me, made it all the more convincing. It changed my world view. 

At the time I was working in Indonesia. We held a brown-bag lunch in our office to discuss the Stern Review. That same week I caught The Simpsons movie, which also contributed to my environmental awareness (not really, but it is about the environment, and made me laugh quite a lot). But what made the issue real for me in Indonesia was seeing at first hand some of the work being done under a DFID-funded forestry programme. Deforestation accounts for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but about 80% in Indonesia. What was crystal clear was that no lasting solution would be possible that did not take fully into account the interests of the millions of predominantly poor people who live in or around these forests, and depend on them as sources of income. In other words, tackling climate change is intimately linked with tackling poverty. 

Since moving to my current job last year, the closeness of the links between climate change and poverty have been driven home to me. Despite its reputation as an emerging economic power, India is home to over 450 million poor people (19% more than the whole of Africa) and has one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition. These are the people who will be – indeed, already are being - most affected by climate change, which will increase poverty, hunger, child mortality and disease, and threaten access to safe drinking water. 

At the same time, any plan for reducing growth in greenhouse gas emissions in India, one of the world’s fastest growing economies, would be neither morally defensible nor politically saleable if it did not allow the economy to keep on growing fast enough to lift those 450m plus out of poverty. This in turn will mean expanding access to safe, reliable and affordable energy, which remains a critical unmet need for the majority of India’s poor. 

This perspective – the urgent, pressing challenge of safeguarding economic growth and poverty reduction – is central to the Indian government’s approach to any global deal on climate change. It is also central to the British government’s approach - I’m delighted to say, otherwise my job would be a lot more difficult. 

Rajendra Pachauri at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. Credit: WEF

Finally, there’s one more critical element of my intellectual journey, which is the overwhelming scientific consensus that human-induced climate change is real and accelerating. Very few serious scientists now dispute this. It’s a body of evidence that is personified for me by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian scientist and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore). 

One of the privileges of my current job is getting to interact with Dr Pachauri from time to time. Speaking to DFID staff recently at an event organised by The Energy & Resources Institute, which he heads, Dr Pachauri’s sobering message was that that even the bottom end of the range of IPCC projections for climate change would have serious damaging effects – which are already starting to be felt. Dr Pachauri has considerable faith in the power of scientific evidence to compel political action – I wonder if he will be proven right. 

Before I sign off, allow me to apologise for my self-indulgence – as it’s my first blog I hope I’ll be forgiven! In future posts I will aim to share with you some of the lessons we are learning as we grapple with the practical challenges of climate change and development.

This blog features as part of Blog Action Day and the Act on Copenhagen campaign