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UN IPCC Head Pachauri, TERI, Grants, and Awards
The research institute (TERI) run by the head of the UN’s climate body has handed out a series of environmental awards to companies that have given it financial support, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), of which Dr Rajendra Pachauri is the director-general, has given corporate awards to companies such as Pepsi and Honda, as well as Indian businesses.
Those same companies have given financial backing to Teri through grants or paid-for consultancy work.
According to Teri’s own website, Dr Pachauri and his wife are on the jury panel for the 2010 awards. Dr Pachauri has been on the jury panel for the awards in previous years.
The disclosure will lead to further questions over possible conflict of interest against Dr Pachauri, whose position as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is already under threat over errors in its reports.
The Department for International Development (DfID) has pledged to give Teri up to £10 million in grants over five years but will subject the institute to an “institutional assessment”, expected to take at least five months, before handing over any of the money.
Among the companies that have received Teri corporate awards is Hero Honda, a joint venture between the Japanese car company and an Indian firm that manufactures millions of motorbikes every year.
It is described on the institute’s website as a major sponsor and was joint second in Teri’s Environmental Excellence Award in 2008.
Another major sponsor, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, won the Corporate Social Responsibility Award in 2004.
PepsiCo India, which received first prize in 2009 for its business response to Aids, pays Teri for a project studying water quality in a local community.
It has also emerged that Teri’s biggest single sponsor, BP India, which has provided £6 million, paid for dinner and drinks at an event publicising Dr Pachauri’s debut novel. A BP spokesman said it was entirely legitimate to fund the dinner, the company having enjoyed a “long association with Dr Pachauri”.
He confirmed that the firm gave Teri $9.5 million (£6.1 million) between 2006 and 2009 for planting 8,000 hectares of jatropha, a type of bush, as part of a bio-diesel research project.
Dr Pachauri has repeatedly denied any conflict of interest between his work for the IPCC and his work for Teri. In a recent letter to The Sunday Telegraph, he said there was “no question” of either himself, the IPCC or Teri being influenced by associations with organisations.
Read the entire Sunday Telegraph article: Climate change research bungle
October 16th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Then there is the issue of truthfulness, this sdeserves a wider airing:
This should be given a wider airing: The reseach was done by Richard North a year ago and involves and in an Indian court case where a judge ruled that Pachauri had “suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits”
The original court document of the judement is here:
http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/290167/
And this is a extract from Richard North’s EUREferendum citing the contents of court document:
the judge was entirely unconvinced, declaring that the three officers of the Council, including Mr (sic) Pachauri, ” have suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits.”
The Judge went on to say that the defendant had acted in a very arbitrary way, stating: “such things could not be tolerated in a democratic set up.” In a coruscating indictment, he then declared:
And I am afraid, that the affairs and the efficient management of the Centre are not safe in the hands of officers like … Dr R K Pachauri … and they had ignored that the officers have to function as a public functionaries within the parameters of the Constitution.
A year after that judgement, Pachauri was elected to become co-chair of the IPCC. He is still on the Governing Council of the Habitat Centre and between September 2004 and September 2006 was its president.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/hypocrite-as-well-as-liar.html