Bhutan Birding and Heritage Travels

30 July, 2009 - On Tuesday, Bhutan and India discussed the possibility of developing crops resistant to climate change, to keep agriculture apace with warmer global conditions.

“Research will be done for new kinds of crops to address those issues,” said the Indian prime minister’s special envoy on climate change, Shyam Saran, who was on three-day visit to Bhutan.

Shyam Saran, who met with Prime Minister Jigmi Y Thinley and senior government officials, told Kuensel that Bhutan and India share the Himalayas, which have the same reports on melting glaciers and lake formations that could significantly impact on agriculture and food security.

“Agriculture is dependent on climate, as monsoon determines the harvest in South Asia,” he said. “We already experience untimely rainfall, too much rain within short period of time, flooding and drought because of rising temperature, which will have a great impact in the future.”

Bhutan, to some extent, depends on Indian’s food items, particularly rice, and, if India is not secure in terms of food, Bhutan might be affected as well. “At the moment, agriculture production in India isn’t seriously affected by climate change and we also have large food stocks maintained over many years,” he said.

But would having a new agricultural methodology be enough? Mr Saran said that, right now, the focus was on constructing a global agreement to bring about a major reduction in greenhouse gas emission, which is seen as the leading cause for rising global temperatures.

This, he said, was the responsibility of developed countries but, as developing nations, Bhutan and India must first understand what was happening in the region, why it was happening and how to tackle the problems. To understand this, the two countries require scientific and technical resources and, to have these capacities, they needed help from developed nations.

According to research done by the Indian institute of science, Bhutan has increased its forest area between 2000–2005 by 0.3 per cent each year through effective forest conservation and afforestation.

Mr Saran said that Bhutan’s experience was a great encouragement to the world. He also said that a mechanism called REDD Plus (Reduce Emission from Deforestation and forest Degradation) has, in principle, been accepted by the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) to compensate countries that maintained, preserved and increased forest cover.

“India’s stand in the UNFCCC meeting to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December, is to make sure that developing and least developing countries, including Bhutan, get financial and technological support for mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

“Whatever comes up at UNFCCC in Copenhagen should be comprehensive and must cover different aspects like mitigation, adaptation and solutions to technology and financial issues,” he said. “It must be balanced, in the sense that it should be equitable approach that recognizes that each citizen of the globe has equal entitlements to the global atmosphere.”

According to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, deforestation alone contributes about 17 percent of global greenhouse emissions, making it the second largest pollution source next to energy supply.

In that regard the G5 (South Africa, China, India, Mexico and Brazil), in the multilateral agreement, agreed to coordinate their position, work with other G77 members, so that they have a united stand in many of the issues related to climate.