Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Thursday called for drawing up an international treaty that would provide "climate justice" as he opened the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS) here attended by hundreds of Indian and foreign delegates.

"We need globally acceptable and socially inclusive solutions to the challenge of climate change," he said in his speech at the DSDS attended by Presidents Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives and Olafur Ragnar Grimsson of Iceland, and Prime Ministers Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark, Jens Stoltenberg of Norway and Matti Vanhenen of Finland.

Hosted by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), DSDS is the first major international meet on climate change after the U.N. summit in Bali, Indonesia, last December.

Manmohan Singh praised the summit's organizer, the TERI, saying that it had provided a "climate for change to tackle climate change".

The prime minister reiterated his stand which he first mentioned at last year's G-8 summit in Germany that India would never exceed the per capita carbon emissions of the developed countries.

Carbon emissions to the earth's atmosphere, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide, is leading to climate change that is already affecting farm output, worsening frequency and severity of droughts, floods and storms and raising sea levels.