NEW DELHI: India plans to confirm a staggering 175 gigawatt target for growing its renewable energy portfolio next week, while continuing to champion poor countries in demanding that industrialized nations assume the brunt of responsibility for decades of climate-warming emissions and provide financing to help others cope with the consequences, the environment minister said Thursday.

Describing poverty as a key source of global pollution, Prakash Javadekar told the Associated Press on Thursday that nations hoping to reach a global climate pact in Paris in December had to commit to a world where all 7 billion-plus inhabitants had equal rights and access to electricity, opportunity and justice.

"Poverty is in a way a real polluting factor," Javadekar said, describing the need to elevate hundreds of millions of Indians still living below $2 a day as the country's top priority.

"But today, I see the carbon space occupied by the developed world," he said, noting that building infrastructure and growing the economy would require an increase in carbon emissions.

"We are asking the developed world to vacate the carbon space to accommodate us. That carbon space demand is climate justice. It's our right as a nation. It's our right as people of India, and we want that carbon space."

India is one of the last major polluters yet to submit its plans for combating and coping with climate change to the United Nations, before the world's nations attempt to nail down a global climate pact in Paris in December. Already, countries and economies representing at least 60 percent of global emissions have announced their targets, including China and the United States, though experts say the pledges so far fall short of what's needed to spare the temperatures rising any less than 2.9-3.1 degrees Celsius.

Javadekar said the Indian pledge on climate action will be released Oct. 1, and will include targets not only for growing renewable energy but also for curbing the intensity of its emissions growth, in other words, the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions released for every dollar of economic output or gross domestic product.

It will not include targets for cutting emissions in total, and it will not include a projection for when India's emissions growth might peak.