Journalists can be catalysts for change by communicating the message of sustainable development to the masses, said Ajay Mathur, the Director General of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), on Tuesday while welcoming the journalists from six countries who are participating in the Media Colloquium organised as part of the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS).

The world is at a critical stage in tackling climate change and the historic Paris Climate Change Accord received just Tuesday afternoon the ratification from the European Union, allowing for the agreement to be implemented, he said. The EU ratification followed India's only a few days ago.

For implementing the accord across the world, the media has to carry the message to the people and the Colloquium will help journalists in this by developing their knowledge of the climate change and sustainable development issues and their skills for communicating them, he added. For this, they will have the resources of TERI and access to the top experts at the Summit.

To achieve these aims, TERI brought together 20 journalists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nepal, Sri Lanka and from nine Indian states and a Union Territory. The Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Union sponsored the Colloquium.

On the next day - the first day of the Summit - the journalists heard from experts and diplomats about international cooperation, poverty reduction and the role of developing countries as drivers of the revolution for sustainability.

International cooperation for cleaner environment:
Cesare Onestini, the Deputy Head of the European Union Delegation to India, spoke about how international cooperation could help bring about a cleaner environment and fight climate change. As a model for such cooperation, he cited the EU-India cooperation on water that aims to rejuvenate the iconic Ganga river.

The EU-India water partnership envisages cooperation in water law and governance, promotion of research, innovation and exchange of business solutions, and joint initiatives to clean up India's water bodies by bringing together a wide array of stakeholders on both sides.

On resource efficiency and waste management, Onestini said, "While India's material consumption per capita is lower than that of other major economies, it is projected to rise substantially causing overall extraction to increase from 5 billion tonnes at present to 15 billion tonnes by 2030." This could be an area that calls for major cooperation between India and the EU.

Henriette Faergemann, the EU's Counselor for Environment, Energy and Climate Change in New Delhi, stressed cooperation in the sectors of water, urbanization, clean energy and climate change.

Explaining the EU's clean energy and climate change initiative, Faergemann said, "India notified its ratification (of the Paris agreement) on October 2, which is symbolic as it was the birthday of Mahatma Gandhiji. EU has also given its ratification on the Paris agreement. So, jointly, our two parts of the world -- the world's two largest democracies-have enabled the entry into force of the Paris Agreement. We all have to roll up the sleeves and turn to real action on the ground".

She also highlighted on the offshore wind projects, which EU would take up in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat.

Developing countries will be drivers of change
"Developing countries did not cause climate change, but they will drive the change," said Rachel Kyte, the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General and Chief Executive Officer of Sustainable Energy for All.

Her statements came a day after the EU ratified the Paris Climate Change Agreement against the backdrop of differences between developed and developing countries over who is responsible for climate change and who should accordingly ameliorate it.

Kyte said there are three links to achieving the aims of the Paris agreement and the Sustainable Development Goal simultaneously: Closing the energy gap by 2030, doubling the rate of energy efficiency and doubling the use of renewable energy resources.

Working towards these goals, simultaneously, will ensure clean development, she said.

Kyte said that developing countries, especially India, with its strength in the manufacturing sector would only stand to benefit, from the Paris Agreement. With the Paris Agreement, India can just "take off," she said.

"We are at the cusp of a new revolution when it comes to increasing the efficiency of electrical appliances or cars. With countries agreeing to implementing the climate change agreement, a market has already been created for products that are energy efficient. India has an opportunity here," she said.

While developed countries will support the shift, the developing countries can be at the forefront of the effort as they can entirely avoid the present industrial model on which the developed countries were built. The developing nations will have to drive innovation towards this goal, because their survival in the future depended on this.

Linking energy to development while meeting environmental goals:
The link between sustainable development and energy was explored in an interactive session on "The Mission Today: Rural Development and Poverty Reduction" with TERI's experts, S Vijay Kumar, Distinguished Fellow, Amit Kumar, the Senior Director for Social Transformation and Sustainable Habitats, and Suneel Pandey, the Director of the Green Growth and Resource Efficiency Division.

Eight of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals are dependent on energy, said Amit Kumar. Its top two goals are "no poverty" and "zero hunger," and they require a critical link between energy and development.

Despite projects that aim to bring about development and the financing available for them, the poor often remain poor, because of deficiencies in administration and delivery in some places, Vijay Kumar said. "To ensure development, we have to look at how to plug this gap."

Answering a question as to whether a bottoms up approach will help deal with this, Vijay Kumar said that all things could not have a bottoms up approach. "The ideas, technology and so on may have to have a top down approach but it will have to be customised for the local (conditions). The solution could go wrong if it was entirely a bottoms up approach," he said.

He added that a combination of NGOs, the media and the courts needed to mount pressure to frame correct policies and see to their implementation.

The scope of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) could also be expanded to include work that improved forests, improved the resilience of people and adaptation to climate change, he said.

According to Pandey, people will have to have a stake in infrastructure projects because if they were given away free they did not carry the same value to the people as they did not have ownership.