US commits to India’s energy transition
By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, November 11: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in their joint joint statement on Friday committed to the global action on climate action, with thrust on Indian energy transition.
At the ninth meeting of the Economic and Financial Partnership, the statement reaffirmed that regular dialogue is crucial to the US-India economic relationship and to advancing global efforts to tackle pressing economic challenges.
The meeting witnessed a dedicated session on climate finance in a bid to drive progress in combating climate change by collaborating closely on the shared goal of scaling up and mobilizing climate finance to meet ambitious climate goals. “We agreed that public finance, when paired with enabling policies, can promote private finance. We also noted the importance of the evolving role of the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to better address global challenges, including climate change. We acknowledge the developed country goal to jointly mobilize $100 billion every year till 2025 from public and private sources for developing countries, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation,” noted the joint statement.
The two nations agreed to work together in arriving at a new collective quantified goal from a floor of $100 billion annually for the post 2025 period, taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries. “We agreed that India and the US should work together with partners to pursue a broad mix of public and private financing to facilitate India’s energy transition in line with its nationally determined climate goals and capabilities,” added the joint statement.
India and the US would hold further discussion of climate-aligned finance under the G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group. The US would be the co-chair and India will take over the G20 Presidency next year.
It is noteworthy to note that the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt has adopted the damage finance for climate change in its agenda. While the developed countries had committed to provide $100 billion since 2010, only $83 billion had so far been mobilised according to the UN report, which had also stated that only $58 billion had been spent on climate change mitigation efforts.
The joint statement also emphasised to strengthen cooperation in anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) efforts, through increased information sharing and coordination, including expeditious sharing of digital evidence and information for ML/TF investigations, as well as through the US-India AML/CFT bilateral dialogue.
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