Article by Mridul Chadha appearing courtesy of Celsias.

In yet more positive news for international climate negotiations, India has announced that it is open to international review and reporting of its domestic mitigation measures.

The step is a colossal change in India’s policy and is seen as a major boost to the chances of successful negotiation of new climate deal at Copenhagen this December.

India has long maintained that it is bound to report results of only internationally funded clean energy projects. The issue of reporting and accounting of carbon emission reduced has been a contentious issue for a long time.
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The Indian government says the country’s carbon dioxide emissions will grow three to five times by 2031 as its economy expands and its population continues to soar from 1 billion to 1.5 billion people.

Government projections say CO2 emissions will increase from 1.4 billion tons last year to between 4 billion and 7.3 billion tons annually by 2031. India now produces about 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Indian officials have rejected assertions by developed countries that India needs to rein its CO2 emissions, saying the country has the right to improve its standard of living and that per-capita emissions — expected to double by 2031 — will still remain comparatively low.

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A pair of satellites that measures changes in the earth’s gravity has shown that the intense irrigation of a 1,200-mile swath of northern India is depleting groundwater at a rate of 1.5 to 4 inches per year.

The satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), show that the region — inhabited by 600 million people heavily dependent on irrigated agriculture — is withdrawing 13 cubic miles of water per year from underground aquifers.

Reporting in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, U.S. and Indian scientists analyzed satellite data from 2002 to 2008 and concluded that Indian farmers are pumping out groundwater 70 percent faster than estimated by the Central Ground Water Board of India in the 1990s.

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The World Bank has recently published a book that might be interesting to fellow CleanTechies. “Financing Energy Efficiency: Lessons from Brazil, China, India, and Beyond” says that aforementioned countries will more than double their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions within a single generation if they fail to implement successful energy efficiency efforts. Given the increasing energy demand from these three developing nations at a time of skyrocketing worldwide energy prices and greenhouse gas emissions, there should be a general interest to reduce energy consumption in these countries.

Alarming figures
China, India and Brazil are three of the world’s top 10 energy consumers. Together these countries are expected to represent 40% of the world’s population and be responsible for well over 50% of all energy demand by developing countries. By 2030, they are expected to account for 42% of growth in energy demand worldwide.

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Solar panels aren’t for hippies and space stations any more…  The Vatican has replaced the panels on the roof of the Paul VI Hall with PV modules.

The modules were made according to the specs of the original tiles planned by the building’s architect, Pier Luigi Nervi. We tend to conveniently forget, but the “Church” has a long history of supporting science (not always… refrain from the obvious in your comments please!) – in that vein the inauguration ceremony will take place at the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

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