NEW DELHI: CJI Surya Kant on Friday told Commonwealth Countries that it is unfair that the industrialised countries, who took two centuries to adopt clean energy, are asking the nations in the process of industrialisation to move towards renewable energy within decades.Speaking at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, CJI Kant said, “Countries that are finally industrialising are being asked to move rapidly towards renewable power, and often made to bear the brunt of criticism when they cannot move fast enough. In comparison, the nations urging that transition spent two centuries building their own strength on coal and oil,” he said.Addressing the common platform for 56 countries on “Policy dialogue on climate justice”, the CJI said the cumulative shift of commonwealth countries to clean energy depends on copper, cobalt and lithium, extraction of which carries environmental and social consequences.Developing countries facing myriad challenges depending on their geographical locations and pushing them towards clean energy at an unrealistic pace could create more challenges than solutions, he warned.Justice Kant said, “The challenge, therefore, is to reconcile the urgency of the clean energy transition with the principles of fairness and shared responsibility that must underpin it.”He said the Supreme Court of India and the HCs have played a significant role in protecting the environment, ecology and its endangered species. He recounted the Zambian HC making a copper mining company liable for polluting water. Commonwealth countries can learn from each other’s experience to bolster efforts towards smoother transition towards clean energy without making their populations pay a heavy price, he said.“We need not develop a separate jurisprudential vocabulary in every country where a climate question reaches the Courts. Rather, the Courts should be open to borrowing ideas, approaches, and solutions that have proved useful elsewhere in the Commonwealth, while adapting them carefully to their own constitutional, social, and environmental circumstances,” he said.“Courts must be willing to search for solutions that protect the environment without losing sight of the legitimate needs of development, and to recognise that the two need not always be cast as choices in which one must defeat the other,” CJI Kant said.
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He cited the case before SC where the officials were accused of felling many trees to widen a road for access to a super specialty hospital for wounded para-military forces. “We had no wish to reward officials who had cut trees; equally, we had no wish to deny wounded soldiers an ambulance route,” he said.Instead of halting the widening of roads, the SC had ordered extensive compensatory afforestation. “We still monitoring that afforestation today… development and preservation do not always have to stand on opposite sides of the scales. Sometimes, the task of a Court is to find the third way to promote both routes through judicial creativity,” he said.
