India Expresses "Strong Reservation" On Paris Climate Talks Rulebook

India has expressed its reservation over the lack of equity in the rules relating to global stock-taking in implementing the 2015 Paris climate change agreement. "India wishes to express its strong reservation regarding the treatment of equity in the global stock-take decision," India's lead negotiator Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Saturday at the plenary.

"Equity is specifically mentioned in Article 14 of the Paris Agreement. It is the basic principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement along with the common but differentiated responsibilities," he said.

"The entire global stock-take exercise will be lopsided if the process, input, the technical assessment and output of the global stock-take does not fully address equity. Equity demands that the vulnerabilities, problems and challenges of the poor and marginalised be prioritised to ensure climate justice," Mr Prasad said.

Nearly 200 nations agreed to enforce rules on implementing the Paris Agreement.

COP24 president Michal Kurtyka jumps at the end of the final session of the COP24 summit on climate change in Katowice, southern Poland, on December 15, 2018.

Negotiations at the UN Climate Change Conference, also known as COP24, dragged on into the final hours of Saturday, one full day beyond the original deadline, suffering some holdback due to certain objections of Brazil and Turkey.

The talks finally ended with the 133-page Paris rulebook being unanimously adopted in the Polish city of Katowice.