Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh took a strong objection to a section of a UN report which included the reduction of CO2 emission and ozone depletion as a target in millennium development goals (MDGs).

“I am shocked to see it. Nowhere and at no point of time reduction of carbon dioxide emission a target in the MDGs,” Ramesh said on Friday after releasing the ESCAP/ADB/UNDP Asia-Pacific MDG Report 2011-12, titled “Accelerating Equitable Achievement of the MDGs: Closing the Gaps in Health and Nutrition in Asia and the Pacific.”

The goal number seven of the MDG talks about achieving four targets by 2015 – forest cover, safe drinking water, basic sanitation and improving the lives of slum dwellers.

“Even the reduction of consumption of ozone depletion was never a target of the MDGs. The table 1.1 of the report in page nine shows regressing or progressing in this aspect which was never there,” said Ramesh.

“No developing countries have accepted the goal of reduction in the absolute decline of CO2,” said Ramesh, who is former environment minister.

Though Ramesh praised the report on the whole, he added that inclusion of CO2 emissions and ozone depletion detracts from the report which has so much of value to add. “This particular section in the report has very serious conceptual, intellectual and analytical flaw.”

Ramesh said it comes under the debate of climate change how much carbon dioxide that any country reduces not the MDGs target. “India and other developing countries have taken a view that absolute level of CO2 emissions can’t be reduced. India has agreed upon reducing intensity of carbon dioxide,” he added.

Talking to Governance Now, UN officials said the reduction of CO2 was not an official target. “It was a target introduced by the technical committee later (2002), not official in that sense,” said Ajay Chibber, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations.

The MDG target was introduced in 2000 by the United Nations and endorsed by the member nations. It outlines an eight-point agenda to be achieved by 2015.