UK-India conversation on climate change

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Hello and welcome to my new blog. A friend and regular blogger for CNN-IBN invited me to be a guest on the site. I confess to being a little nervous - it's my first time. But communicating is a big part of my job as a diplomat, so I'm keen to give it a go. And there's clearly no better time to start - given the inspiration of Shashi Tharoor's twittering.

I wanted to start a blog to help broaden the UK-India conversation about climate change. It's just under six months until the global community comes together in Copenhagen to agree a new global framework to tackle climate change, in December 2009.

So I'll be living and breathing the negotiations until then - and giving my take on what they might mean for India and for the UK. I have a great job that allows me to interact with a wide variety of people working on climate change, energy and development issues in Delhi, around India and in the wider region.

And because I'm passionate about the subject I also talk to people who work in completely different jobs but may have strong opinions about the issue.

So I hope to give you a flavour of some of those conversations too.

Assuming anyone reads what I write, I'd like to know if what I say strikes a positive chord or sounds outrageous or completely misses the point, so I hope to hear from you too. I'll post again in the next couple of days.

Brief Profile:

Fergus Auld is First Secretary, Climate Change and Energy at the British High Commission in New Delhi. He's been in India since March 2008. Previously he headed the climate change team at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London managing the global network of UK climate change attaches and representing the UK at the UN climate negotiations. He first visited (and fell in love with) India as a backpacker in 1991.