…Will engage ‘Champion of the Earth’
CHAIR of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Dr. Rajendra Pachauri will be
coming to Guyana tomorrow for a one-day visit where he will engage in discussions with President Bharrat Jagdeo and members of the Cabinet before proceeding to Brazil for a meeting of one of the body’s working groups. “Guyana would be hosting the Nobel Laureate who is actually the Chair of the award-winning Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. The visit would allow for a meeting with Guyana’s Champion of the Earth President Jagdeo and his Cabinet colleagues,” said Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary Dr. Roger Luncheon at a post-cabinet news conference yesterday.

“The discussions that would likely take place would occur during the planned dinner on Sunday night, immediately after his arrival on Sunday morning and among the invitees to that dinner would be the leaders in the private sector as well as State functionaries, particularly those in the natural resources sector. That dinner would be hosted by the President and it would be held at State House,” Dr. Luncheon said.

Regarding the visit by Dr. Pachauri, Dr. Luncheon said there was no specific request for, or objective of, the visit.

“The Government and international leaders in climate change, when they meet, they generally exchange offers of visits to either their institutions or their countries,” he said.

Dr. Luncheon made the note that Dr. Pachauri is not unknown to the administration. “I, myself, visited his institute in 1994 with then President [Cheddi] Jagan. We went on a tour of Asia. At that time, he was a Scientist and did not attract the kind of international reputation and attention that he now attracts as Chair of the IPCC,” Dr. Luncheon said.

“As I said in my opening statement, a Nobel Laureate and the opportunity to meet a Champion of the Earth is something that we could aspire to and we ought to promote…,” Luncheon told reporters.

Dr. Pachauri will be making a presentation immediately after the dinner at State House on Sunday night. It is likely that President Jagdeo will also give remarks.
Dr. Luncheon said government’s Low Carbon Development Strategy and its REDD+ initiatives have been done also with the purpose of furthering research that may, in time, inform the science and in turn the political decisions regarding climate change mitigation and adaptation.

“I believe that the engagements with the IPCC has gone a far way in bringing to their attention what is happening in Guyana with the LCDS and they, themselves, because of the inter-governmental nature of their mandate, have certainly been following what has been going on at the UN and the Convention and has actually seen heightened attention that have corrected previous decades of work in bringing the contribution of forests to the fore,” he said.

Dr. Luncheon said the encounter with Dr. Pachauri and members of the government and the President would be an encounter of the converts.

“The case has been made, not that we have achieved all that we expect to achieve from a well-made case and, therefore, there is necessity to continue,” he asserted.

According to his online biography, Dr Rajendra K. Pachauri was born in Nainital, India, on 20 August 1940.

He assumed his current responsibilities as the head of Tata Energy Research Institute in 1981, first as Director and, since April 2001, as Director-General.

Dr Pachauri was elected as Chairman of IPCC and took charge as chairman on April 20, 2002 onwards. He has been active in several international forums dealing with the subject of climate change and its policy dimensions.

The IPCC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, was established by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in 1988 with the objective of assessing the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change in what the body referred to as a “policy relevant but not policy prescriptive” manner.

The IPCC assesses peer-reviewed and published scientific and technical literature to produce authoritative, policy-relevant, state-of-the-art scientific reports which then are used to guide policymakers at negotiations of the various bodies within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

At the end of the visit, Dr. Pachauri will be proceeding to the IPCC’s Working Group II South and Central America Regional Expert Meeting to be held in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil from Monday.