📰 India demands $1 trillion as ‘climate finance’
India’s NDCs are subject to the availability of this amount in climate finance, says key negotiator
•India has demanded a trillion dollars over the next decade from developed countries to adapt to, and mitigate, the challenges arising from global warming, and has kept this as a condition for delivering on climate commitments made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a senior official who is part of ongoing climate agreement negotiations in Glasgow told The Hindu.
•India’s five-fold plan, as Mr. Modi spelt out on November 2, is as follows — India’s non-fossil energy capacity would reach 500 GW by 2030; it will meet 50% of its electricity requirements with renewable energy by 2030; reducing its total projected carbon emissions by a billion tonnes by 2030; it will reduce the carbon intensity of its economy to less than 45% and achieve net zero by 2070.
•Net zero is when a country’s carbon emissions are offset by taking out equivalent carbon from the atmosphere, so that emissions in balance are zero. However, achieving net zero by a specific date means specifying a year, also called a peaking year, following which emissions will begin to fall.
•“Our NDCs (Nationally Determined Contribution) are conditional, that is, subjected to the availability of this amount [$1 trillion] in climate finance. NDCs can be submitted with conditions. The decision on when to submit revised NDCs has not yet been taken,” Rameshwar Prasad Gupta, Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests and Climate Change, told The Hindu. He is among India’s key negotiators and currently present at the ongoing talks in Glasgow.
•Nationally Determined Contributions are voluntary targets that countries set for themselves, which describe the quantum and kind of emission cuts they will undertake over a fixed period to contribute to preventing runaway global warming.
•India’s last NDC was submitted following the Paris Agreement of 2015. Before COP26 began on November 1, countries were expected to provide updated NDCs. India, however, did not furnish one.
•He added that developing countries, as a group, had demanded $1 trillion annually. Mr. Gupta did not, however, clarify the members of this group, or if India had formally communicated these demands, or if they had emerged as part of the negotiations.
•Delivering on climate finance is among the stickiest points of contention between developed and developing countries because developed countries, as a group, have failed to provide $100 billion annually by 2020, as promised from a decade ago.
•With the conference scheduled to draw to an end on Friday, nearly 200 countries are yet to finalise a final text of an agreement.
•As The Hindu reported on Wednesday, a draft consensus document of the agreement underlines that the promised climate finance by developed countries is “insufficient to respond to the worsening climate change impacts in developing countries” and urges these developed countries to “urgently scale up”.
•“The funds necessary for adaptation must increase,” Bhupender Yadav, Environment Minister, had said on Wednesday, adding, “Our consistent stand has been that developing countries such as India need transparency in terms of what kind of market mechanism will be in place. This is necessary to ensure that developing and developed countries are on a level playing field.”
Tamil Nadu’s cities need long-term solutions to avoid the monsoon woes
•The ongoing spell of heavy rain in Chennai has again exposed the vulnerability of the city, a coastal metropolis with a flat terrain, to floods, and raised more questions than answers about the Government’s preparedness to deal with the northeast monsoon. The first spell of heavy rain of 21 cm, mostly in the early hours of Sunday (November 7), caught everyone by surprise. Despite storm water drains and waterways running to about 700 km being cleared in the last four months, no tangible improvement was seen in the problem of inundation. The nightmare of the 2015 December floods haunted Chennai in the backdrop of the authorities monitoring the release of surplus water from the reservoirs on the outskirts. Even as the city was struggling to get back to normality, there was a depression in the Bay of Bengal, which crossed the coast near Chennai on Thursday. This time, the city did not experience very heavy rainfall but several suburbs such as Tambaram and Red Hills recorded over 22 cm of rain. In the last four days, other parts of the State too were at the receiving end of the monsoon. Nagapattinam, one of the backward areas of the Cauvery delta, was battered after 31 cm fell in a day.
•The crux of the problem is the issue of drainage, be it in Chennai or in Nagapattinam. In a large urban setting such as Chennai, shrinking open space, the gap between the coverage of the drains and that of sewer lines, ageing drains and sewer networks in core areas of the city, and encroachments or obstructions hampering the free flow of water are responsible for the mess. The city is blessed with a few rivers such as the Cooum and the Adyar, apart from a number of canals including the Buckingham Canal. All these waterbodies, if properly maintained, can be very effective flood carriers, sparing several residential localities from inundation. The State Government, which is executing a couple of integrated storm water drain projects, should look for durable solutions to the city’s long-standing woes and executing them in a short span of time. The Government has been swift in providing relief and its seriousness in the matter can be seen from the fact that Chief Minister M.K. Stalin visited flood-hit areas continuously since Sunday for a first-hand account of the problems. Often in the past, the determination shown in finding a long-term solution to waterlogging waned during the non-monsoon periods. Mr. Stalin, who was Chennai Mayor and Local Administration Minister earlier, is well-placed now to put his experience to use and pull the city out of the quagmire. The people too should be responsible enough in ensuring that the waterbodies and drains are not turned into dumps.
📰 Undefined role: On India-Afghanistan bilateral relations
India must be clear on how it wants to shape Afghanistan’s destiny under the Taliban
•By holding the Third Regional Security Dialogue on Afghanistan, chaired by NSA Ajit Doval this week, New Delhi has sent out three strong messages: one, that it wishes to remain an important and engaged player in the future of Afghanistan; second, that with the exit of U.S.-NATO troops, the ideal solution to the situation is through consensus in Afghanistan’s extended neighbourhood including Russia; and third, that the Afghan humanitarian crisis should be the region’s immediate priority and political differences can be set aside to help. It is the last message that spurred New Delhi to invite the NSAs from China and Pakistan, despite the LAC standoff and deep differences with the Imran Khan government over Kashmir and cross-border terrorism. By declining the invitation, Beijing and Islamabad have made it clear that they do not intend to assist India in its Afghan engagement, further demonstrated by the Khan government’s churlishness in refusing India road access to send wheat and medicines to Kabul. To that end, the Delhi Declaration issued by the eight participating nations, including Iran and Russia, is a milestone in keeping India inside the discussion on Afghanistan. The declaration goes farther than the previous such regional discussion of SCO countries in Dushanbe in September, in its strong language on terrorism, terror financing and radicalisation. It also expands on the need for an inclusive government in Kabul that will replace the Interim Taliban regime, and promotes a national reconciliation process.
•While the consensus over the Delhi Declaration is a creditable feat, it does not paper over all the differences between India and the other countries over their far stronger engagement with Kabul. For instance, Turkmenistan sent a Ministerial delegation to discuss connectivity with the Taliban, while Uzbekistan accorded the visiting Taliban Deputy PM full protocol and discussed trade, transit and the construction of a railway line. Russia and Iran still maintain their embassies in Kabul, and a “Troika-plus” U.S.-China-Russia-Pakistan engagement is taking place with the Taliban Foreign Minister, in Islamabad this week. With the “normalisation” of ties with the Taliban regime growing, New Delhi must now consider how far it wishes to go in its engagement with Afghanistan. On the one hand, India has publicly held talks with Taliban officials twice and expressed solidarity with Afghans, but on the other has refused practically all visa seekers, made no monetary contribution to the humanitarian crisis there, and has made no bid to continue with plans for trade and connectivity with Afghanistan. India’s desire to lead the discussion on Afghanistan’s destiny, as demonstrated by the NSA dialogue, is a worthy goal for a regional leader, but can only be fulfilled once the Government defines more clearly what it wants its Afghan role to be, despite all its differences with the regime now in power.
📰 The lowdown on India’s Glasgow announcement
The newly unveiled commitments at COP26 deserve examination as they came amidst very contradictory official signals
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise declaration on November 2, 2021 at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, of striking enhancements in India’s emissions reduction targets did not, for several reasons, get the rave reviews the Government may have expected. Except for a few specialists, international commentators expressed disappointment that India was promising net zero emissions only by 2070 instead of 2050. In India, several analysts praised the new targets as indicating a new climate-oriented development policy.
Persisting trend
•The Government’s raised ambition represents a welcome continuity of the cross-partisan consensus prevailing since the 2015 Paris Agreement. The new policy paradigm, initiated at the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, had departed from the earlier long-held stance that India, as a developing country, was not obliged to cut emissions, and asserted that although India was not a part of the problem, it was now willing and able to contribute to reduction efforts in global emissions. India’s pledge at Glasgow, not yet formally submitted as an updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) as required, adheres to the Paris Agreement decision to increase emission cuts to tackle the rapidly escalating climate crisis.
•India’s newly unveiled commitments deserve close examination, since they came amidst sharply contradictory signals from the Government over several months. Many interactions took place with high-ranking emissaries visiting India and at the G20 meeting before COP26, with India giving no indication of revising its current NDC. Right up to the Prime Minister’s speech, senior Indian officials were loudly proclaiming the unacceptability of net-zero and the unlikelihood of higher targets by India. People in India are familiar with the penchant for dramatic announcements by this Government, but the value of such secrecy in the climate negotiations is questionable. India insufficiently communicated the significance of its enhanced commitments, especially in contrast to the weak pledges of developed countries, and little effort was made to leverage India’s updated pledge to extract deeper emission cuts from them.
•At the time of writing, India has further muddied the waters and taken some sheen off its Glasgow announcement, with senior officials stating that the new pledges are contingent upon substantial financial assistance from developed countries, with figures such as $1 trillion being mentioned in press interviews. Ramifications of such post-facto conditions would unfold gradually, and further speculation here is pointless.
The substance
•India’s new targets, details perhaps varying in an updated NDC, comprise five elements: reducing Emissions Intensity (EI), or emissions per unit of GDP, by 45% in 2030 relative to 2005 levels; cutting absolute emissions by one billion tonnes, presumably from projected business-as-usual (BAU) 2030 levels; 500 GW (1 Giga watt = 1,000 Megawatts) of non-fossil fuel installed power generation capacity by 2030; 50% electricity generation from renewable sources by 2030; and net-zero emissions by 2070.
•India’s existing NDC and subsequent submissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confirm a steady decline in EI of over 2% p.a. from 2005 onwards. Both the 33%-35% decline promised at Paris, and the updated 45% reduction by 2030, are quite achievable and par for an emerging economy.
•Emissions reduction by one billion tonnes by 2030, the first time India has put an absolute number to this, can be read in different ways. India’s current annual emissions are around 2.8 billion tonnes and projected to reach about 4.5 billion tonnes in 2030 on a BAU basis, so the pledged reduction would be a substantial 20%, comparing favourably with several developed country targets. However, the Prime Minister’s speech in Glasgow mentioned the Railways’ net-zero 2030 target cutting 60 million tonnes annually, and LED bulbs cutting another 40 million tonnes a year, yielding one billion tonnes over 10 years from just these two measures, making the pledged reduction seem easy, which it probably is not.
•On installed power generation capacity, India’s extant NDC had incorporated the Government’s declared goal of 175 GW from renewable energy (RE) sources by 2022, even though the NDC stretched to 2030, raising an anomaly. Even so, India has reached only around 101 GW of solar and wind due to numerous constraints. If one adds large hydro and nuclear, both now considered renewable, current RE installed capacity is about 150 GW or just under 40% of total, almost achieving the NDC target for 2030 showing under-projection. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) in its 2020 Report on Energy Mix for 2029-30 has projected around 525 GW or 64.3% non-fossil fuel installed capacity including 280 GW Solar and 140 GW wind. Only 267 GW is projected to come from coal and lignite, compared to 203 GW in 2019, so almost all of India’s future growth of capacity is to come from RE. Without actually saying so, India at Glasgow therefore seems to have pledged virtually no additional coal-based power! Even accounting for some confusion about whether the Prime Minister meant installed capacity or electricity produced, India’s Glasgow pledge of 50% electricity from RE by 2030 is just a tad more than the CEA projection of 44.7%. These commitments may prove difficult as currently witnessed, combined with the need for storage and grid stability.
Address the deep inequities
•The Glasgow pledges come from a few sectors mostly related to electricity generation. However, a truly transformational low-carbon future must embrace many more aspects, as indeed emphasised at Glasgow by the Prime Minister as “Lifestyle for Environment (LIFE)”. It is also time that India, hitherto vociferous about equity between nations, now seriously addresses the deep inequity in access to energy and other essentials within India. Climate change is multi-dimensional, not confined to mitigation alone and, as all studies tell us, should be tackled cross-sectorally.
•Accelerated deployment of electric or fuel-cell vehicles must go alongside a rapid reduction in personal vehicle use and a major push for mass transportation. Carbon lock-ins and energy use need to be minimised through mandatory “green” construction codes for the huge housing and other buildings stock, highways and infrastructure yet to be built. A leap in employment-intensive recycling of waste goods and materials, including in solid and liquid waste management linked to methane recovery, would deliver substantial co-benefits across sectors.
Where New Delhi slipped
•Two big disappointments with India’s stance at Glasgow deserve mention. First, India refused to join over 110 countries in a declaration to end deforestation by 2030. India’s pledges also do not mention the NDC target for forests and tree cover, in which India is known to be slipping, with deleterious impacts on both the environment and livelihoods of tribals and other forest dwellers. Read together, these may confirm the worst fears of many regarding efforts to dilute environmental regulations in favour of corporate interests. Second, India also did not join the Global Methane Pledge by over 100 nations to reduce emissions of the short-lived but potent greenhouse gas by 30% by 2030 from 2020 levels, when methane is among the fastest growing emissions in India.
•On the other hand, Glasgow saw India launch another international climate initiative called Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS), aimed at providing technical, knowledge and financial assistance to small island nations with the help of developed countries. One wishes such an initiative was undertaken in India too, where coastal erosion, sea-level rise, and urban flooding due to extreme rainfall exacerbated by haphazard urbanisation are acquiring threatening dimensions.
•It would be ideal too if the on-going updating of the NDC was done through a cross-partisan multi-stakeholder consultative process that would make it truly “nationally determined” and implemented.
