A climate crisis agenda remains urgent

People wade through waterlogged roads following heavy rains in Vijayawada on September 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The next five years are critical for India’s climate action efforts, given its ambitious 2030 targets. While significant advances in solar and renewable energy are under way, India’s heavy reliance on coal remains a concern, with clean energy accounting for only 22% of the electricity mix. Key environmental issues that need urgent attention include reducing heat stress, improving air quality, managing waste, and enhancing energy efficiency. The growing demand for energy must be matched with comprehensive policies addressing these challenges in the near term. Encouraging businesses to view climate action as an opportunity rather than a challenge is essential, and acting swiftly on India’s carbon market is a crucial step in this direction.

Mitigating pollutants

India is highly vulnerable to heat stress and may soon face heat waves beyond human survivability limits. Mitigating both CO2 emissions and short-lived super pollutants such as methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbons is crucial. These super pollutants, especially methane, contribute significantly to global warming and trap much more heat than CO2 over short periods. Reducing them can prevent more near-term warming than cutting CO2 alone.

Breaking down the climate problem into manageable pieces by pollutants, sinks, or sectors can make solutions more effective. Tailor-made treaties, fair to both rich and poor countries, can be integrated into the Paris Agreement for accountability. The Montreal Protocol provides a successful blueprint. With its Kigali Amendment and move away from super potent F-gases, it is expected to avoid 0.5°C of warming by the end of this century. The next target should be methane, with the potential to avoid nearly 0.3°C of warming by the 2040s. A new treaty led by the U.S., European Union, and China could lock in corporate commitments to reduce methane emissions to near zero by 2030.

Reducing methane emissions through financially feasible gas capture and biogas projects can tackle one of the most potent greenhouse gases (GHGs) while improving urban sanitation. Reducing short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) such as black carbon and enhancing the National Clean Air Programme can significantly improve air quality and public health. However, society must recognise that air pollution is a year-round problem requiring sustained action.

Cleaning the air will require five critical changes: fostering collective responsibility, proactively investing in clean air initiatives, integrating sustainable development, leveraging data-driven interventions for precise actions, and recognising clean air as a driver of economic growth. Effective solutions require coordinated efforts, better monitoring, and regulatory reforms, highlighting the economic and health benefits of clean air for all stakeholders. For improving energy efficiency, faster decarbonisation and adoption of low global warming potential refrigerants, as per the Kigali Amendment, are crucial steps towards reducing GHG emissions.

Importance of carbon markets

Carbon markets will help incentivise reductions in GHGs by offering financial rewards for cutting emissions. To keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5-2°C, global GHG emissions need to be reduced by at least 43%. Carbon markets will play a critical role in driving these reductions. India aims to launch the ‘India Carbon Market’ in 2026. This could help it achieve its Nationally Determined Contributions goals and potentially become the world’s largest emissions trading system by 2030. A well-developed carbon market in India could avoid $35 trillion in climate-related costs over the next 50 years.

Incentivising faster climate action by developing financial ‘carrots’ and a more nuanced approach to carbon trading is essential. Current single-basket metrics, which convert all climate pollutants and emission into CO2 equivalents, offer economic efficiency but obscure the diverse impacts of different pollutants. A more useful measuring stick would treat long-lived pollutants, such as CO2, separately from SLCPs, such as methane or black carbon. Such an approach would provide separate currencies for different pollutants, better accounting for their varied impacts over space and time.

All these actions and more are needed. These require critical scale and coordination. On the governance level, India needs a nodal authority with constitutional powers to ensure collaborative, pre-emptive action with timelines for all stakeholders. This is the bare minimum to ensure accountability and coordination across tiers of government.

A missed opportunity

The 2024 Lok Sabha election largely ignored the escalating climate crisis, despite its inclusion in voter demands. Party commitments to climate action were grossly inadequate. This neglect comes at a time when temperatures across the country are at an all-time high. Low voter turnout was attributed to searing heatwaves across the country. Rising unemployment, farming crises, and high living costs keep the poor focused on survival, deepening inequality. Unlike the West, India lacks a ‘green party’, and the sustainability discourse feels disconnected from ordinary citizens’ reality.

Also read | Over 85% of Indian districts exposed to extreme climate events: Study

Climate-progressive leadership will need to relentlessly work for an environmentally better India. This means pushing beyond mere tokenism and integrating climate action into the core of political agendas.

Zerin Osho is director of the India Program at the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development