Ahead of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP 27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November, the Union Cabinet has approved India’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), a formal statement to climate change. The details of your action plan to address are given. Change. The 2015 Paris Agreement requires countries to spell out a path to ensure that the world does not warm by more than 2 °C, and try to keep it below 1.5 °C by 2100. Subsequent COPs are a strange area where countries can coax, cajole and compromise on cuts that they can operate in multi-decade timelines with minimal impact on their development priorities. While the end product of the COP is a joint agreement signed by all member states, the actual business begins after that, where countries must submit an NDC every five years, to curb fossil-fuel emissions. For this, what will be done after 2020 will have to be mapped. India’s first NDC in 2015 specified eight goals, the most prominent of them being to reduce the emission intensity of GDP by 33%–35% (2005 levels) by 2030, with 40% of its installed electricity capacity from renewable energy. To achieve, and create an additional carbon sink equivalent to 2.5-3 billion tonnes of CO2 through forest and tree cover by 2030. Being a large, populous country, India has high net emissions but low per capita emissions. It has also participated in the COP for decades, making the case that the current climate crisis is largely due to industrialization by the US and developed European countries since 1850. However, years of negotiations, international pressure and clear evidence of the multi-pronged effects of climate change have seen India agree to move away from fossil fuels over time.
At COP 26 in Glasgow in 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out five commitments, or ‘panchamrit’, as the government refers to it, in which India will increase its non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030 and “net zero”. receiving is included. 2070, or no net carbon dioxide emitted from energy sources. However, the press statement was silent on the cabinet’s decision on whether India would cut emissions by a billion tonnes and on building a carbon sink. While India is within its right to specify its emissions route, it should not – at any stage – promise more than it can deliver because it undermines the moral authority that India brings to future negotiations. India has expressed its intention to use energy efficiently through several legislations and many of its large corporations have committed to move away from polluting energy sources. Going forward, this should be the basis for India to be an example to meet its energy use, development and climate goals at its own pace.