India among top five best performing countries on Climate Change: Hardeep Singh Puri

Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri said that India has led action on the issue of climate change under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.“India was in the top five best performing countries on Climate Change, according to the Climate Change Performance Index” , he said at the inaugural session of UrbanShift Forum (Asia) here on Monday.Highlighting the need of localisation of climate agendas, the Minister said that for cities in the Global South, it is critical that we localise our climate agendas.“No discussion on urban planning can be removed from fiscal health. Cities depend heavily on central grants to meet basic financial needs. This needs to change” he said.Puri said that we need to complement traditional revenues with innovative instruments and more diverse access to finance.The Minister expressed the hope that this forum disseminates best practices for the acceleration of climate finance for cities.He also touched upon how India is leading the discourse on encouraging environmentally responsible behaviours and accelerating climate finance through Urban 20.“For the first time, climate finance found a notable mention in the final G20 Declaration,” Puri said.The Minister said that under its widely lauded G20 Presidency, India anchored the discourse on sustainable urbanisation.“Our journey of urbanisation is a success story that has become a blueprint for other countries to learn from, particularly the Global South”, he said.About 150 representatives of national governments and cities in India, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Jordan and Sri Lanka, as well as international organisations, financial institutions, businesses and NGOs are attending the event to exchange knowledge and experiences on regional urban challenges and replicable solutions.The key objective of this forum is to provide training and capacity-building to regional cities on various facets of integrated and sustainable urban development.