COP 26 and India : De-hyphenating Development and Climate Change

On November 12, 2021, India and China faced the heat of both the developed nations as well as the small island countries which are at greatest risk from climate change, due to their collective lobbying to water down the aim of the Glasgow pact from ‘phase-out of coal’ to ‘phase down of coal’. It was a rare moment when you had both the Asian giants on the same side of the argument, though for a debatable outcome. The sentiments coming from civil society activists as well as western leaders, after the summit had concluded, was not quite reassuring for climate optimists as everyone tagged the Glasgow Pact as ‘disappointing and unfruitful. 

But was this historic summit a complete failure? To know the answer to this, it is important to look at it from the perspective of countries like India which face a two-pronged challenge ahead: Reduce poverty or go green? Though some may call this a false binary, it is hard to ignore the immense cost involved in going completely carbon neutral, especially for a developing country like India which needs to spend every penny wisely. This article aims to look at the outcomes of COP 26 from a more realistic point of view, taking into account the dilemmas faced by all parties involved. 

Earlier this year, the Global Hunger Index was published which depressingly put India at the 101st position, behind many of its neighbors including Pakistan, and thus paving the way for much internal political debate and throwing of mud. The hunger scenario in India was flagged as ‘serious’, with a paltry score of 27.5. India had slid down 6 ranks from its previous position on the index which put immense pressure on the Indian political leadership to cover up, ultimately leading to them dismissing and even questioning the methodology of the index. This is just one of many pointers to get an actual sense of the first challenge I mentioned above. In fact, India’s performance in terms of poverty reduction looks pale in comparison to its proactive role in the global action against climate change. 

A 2018 report by the State Bank of India warned that “India has perhaps now only a limited window of a decade to get into the developed country tag or stay perpetually in emerging group of economies”, mainly because we could lose out on one of our main strengths, the demographic dividend, by 2030. The disheartening fact is that the Covid-19 pandemic has worsened poverty in India, pushing at least 75 million more into poverty. India thus has to maintain this great balancing act of meeting both its developmental as well as climate goals. But with scarce resources to spend, it is in doubt whether the country will achieve both goals simultaneously.

 According to the estimates of the think tank Centre for Energy Finance (CEEW), India will need around ten trillion dollars or 700 lakh crores to adequately bring down its emissions to become carbon neutral by 2070. Most of this expenditure will have to be spent towards revamping or developing from scratch the necessary integration, distribution, and transmission infrastructure (around $8.4 trillion). Huge investments will have to be made in the renewable energy sector if India seeks to achieve its intended targets. Another study by CEEW says that India will need to ramp up its installed solar power capacity to 5,630 GWs by 2070 and of it, 500 GWs will have to be added by 2030. Also, our coal usage will have to peak by 2040 and thereafter drop 99% by 2060. 

Crude oil consumption will have to peak by 2050 and then plunge by 90% between 2050 and 2070. The study also highlights that India could fall short by $3.5 trillion to achieve its goal of being net carbon neutral, and thus would require investment support to the tune of $1.4 trillion from the developed nations to bridge the gap. All the while, India will also have to tackle additional challenges like ensuring that the coal workers, as well as others employed in the fossil fuel sector, are not left behind all the while ensuring that energy prices don’t hike shortly. Despite the government’s big push towards the renewable energy sector, India is still dependent on fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum. Moreover, India’s energy demand is ever rising and as we become more developed the per capita consumption of energy also increases alongside. 

Given the fact that India has an entire Ministry dedicated to coal, it is naive to think that India can forego the consumption of fossil fuels on short notice. Under the current technological conditions, the extractable coal reserves of India are expected to last for another fifty to sixty years, which is against the widespread belief that the coal reserves of India are going to last for generations to come. India occupies third place globally in terms of coal-generated electricity production. More than 70% of the electricity produced in India is generated by burning coal. According to the ‘Vision 2025’ draft released by the Ministry of Coal and TERI, (April 15, 2005), of a total of 247.84 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves in India, only 52.24 billion tonnes are extractable(ie; only a fifth of the total reserves). 

Compare this with China, which has more than a thousand billion tonnes of proven coal reserves and is the world’s largest coal producer. One of the main reasons behind the present extent of coal use in India is the inefficiency of existing coal plants, bad grid conditions, transmission loss as well as the poor quality of coal which is abundantly found in India. Many of our decades-old coal plants with low Plant Load Factor and poor efficiency continue to operate solely because they provide electricity at a very frugal cost. Currently, the older plants account for about 23% of the overall installed power generation capacity, thus if India wants to achieve its climate commitments, it is pertinent to decommission older coal-based plants with less than 200MW capacity, within the next decade or earlier. 

At the COP 26 Summit, India spotlighted the need for developed nations to deliver on their promise of immediate financial support to developing nations, so that they may undertake climate action at the scale required as per the first high-level ministerial dialogue on climate finance agreement, Under the Paris Treaty (2015), at the UN climate summit. India’s negotiator, Chandni Raina, is reported to have stated that “the raised ambitions and new goals for tackling climate change would all be in vain if adequate financial support is not provided to developing countries”. 

Thus financial support by the developed world becomes a pre-condition for climate action by the developing countries and the absence of such support can seriously jeopardize the net-zero pledges of parties involved. Given the new commitments made at the Summit, India expects climate finance to the tune of a minimum of $1 trillion at the earliest. The 2021 ‘COP Presidency Draft’ does not mention a separate fund for loss and damage, something that the developing countries have been demanding. Stressing on the ‘polluter pay principle”, India has joined hands with 24 like-minded developing countries(including the BASIC group - Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) to push for climate disaster funding from the developed nations. 

The Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change said that “ rich countries have an obligation, responsibility, duty, and vow to provide climate finance to developing nations and they should deliver on an unfulfilled promise to raise $100 billion a year” (a target set in 2009). He said that climate finance is not charity; it is an obligation, responsibility, and duty of the historic polluters. Despite failing to achieve the target of providing $100 billion of climate finance to poor nations, and asking for an extension of the deadline till 2023, the rich nations have been successful in shifting the rhetoric and putting all the blame on India and China. 

Meanwhile, China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, had only brought about a marginal increase in its climate targets. Compared to this India’s targets looks, perhaps, a bit too ambitious. Before questioning the intentions of India the lobbyists should at least have checked the country’s track record concerningheavy climate action. Take the COP 26 for instance, India was among 27 countries (including Australia, New Zealand, Uganda, Madagascar, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Indonesia, The Philippines, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, The UK, Germany, Columbia, and the UAE) to sign a sustainable agriculture action agenda after the first week of the summit (‘The Sustainable Agriculture Policy Action Agenda for the transition to Sustainable Agriculture and Global Action Agenda for Innovation in Agriculture). 

The signing of this action plan was one of the main highlights of the COP 26 Summit, though it didn’t receive much media attention. By becoming a signatory to this Action Agenda, India agrees to introduce more sustainable practices in its agriculture, reduce agriculture linked pollution and emissions as well as introduce climate-resilient technology to ensure food security. Apart from surprising the world by announcing that India will become net carbon neutral by 2070, PM Modi also announced four short term goals to be achieved by 2030 - 

● Improving renewable power generation capacity 

● Greening India’s energy use 

● Cutting emissions explicitly, and 

● Reducing the economy’s dependence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels India also promised to reduce overall carbon emissions by one billion tons within 2030. 

India also initiated several consultative steps with more than a thousand Civil Society Organizations regarding its intended goals. Keeping the ‘best effort basis’ in mind, India submitted its action plan to the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). To achieve its NDC target, India has to create 25 million - 30 million hectares of forest cover by 2030 - a third of its current forest cover. The country aims to reduce its emissions intensity to GDP by 33-35% below 2005 levels, by 2030. Also by the same deadline, the government plans to achieve 40% of cumulative installed power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources, as well as expand the tree and forest cover to create an additional carbon sink equivalent to 2.5 to 3 billion tones of CO2. 

India and France jointly founded the International Solar Alliance (ISA) which currently has around 120 members including the US and is the largest intergovernmental organization after the UN. Indian PM Modi also launched the “One World, One Solar, One Grid” initiative as part of the Glasgow summit. Perhaps it was because of these reasons that India held the top 10th position in the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), for the second consecutive year in 2020. However, India chose not to sign the Leaders’ Declaration on Ending Deforestation by 2030, initiated by the US and EU and support by almost 90 countries, to reduce methane emissions by 2030 from the 2020 levels.

 China, Russia, Brazil, and Australia were the other major powers that chose not to sign the declaration. Despite this, the COP 26 Agreement won applause for keeping alive the hope of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Global North also backed out from providing a ‘resilience and adaptation fund’ for the small island nations that are already facing the heat of climate change and whose existence is under threat. To state some statistics, the US, Canada, and Japan alone have contributed to around 50% of all the greenhouse gases, over the last 170 years, though they represent only 12% of the global population. Meanwhile, our planet became 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer, and the carbon space shrunk(Kalyan Ray, Deccan Herald, Nov 14, 2021). 

To put things in perspective, the per capita emissions of India are 15 times less than that of the US. As per a study by Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), if India wants to eliminate carbon gasses, it has to achieve 5630 GWs of Solar Efficient Capacity by 2070, for which it will have to keep aside 4.6% of its land area. So it is the right of the developing nations, which face an even more troublesome problem of poverty, to demand their fair share of the carbon budget. However, India can’t keep pointing out its development challenge as an excuse for pushing the climate action deadlines, because both climate change and development are interlinked. In a report released last year, the Ministry of Earth Sciences concluded that since the 1950s, India has witnessed a rise in its mean temperature, a decrease in monsoon precipitation, a rise in extreme temperature, droughts, and sea levels, as well as an increase in the intensity and frequency of cyclones. 

Between 2019-2020, India witnessed two among the 10 most expensive climate change catastrophes, with the Gulab cyclone, Super Cyclone Amphan together costing the country nearly $13 billion while the June-October monsoon flooding costing another $10 million. This was the heaviest monsoon in the recent history of India and the 7th costliest in the world. Again in early 2021, India suffered 2 more cyclones Tauktae and Cyclone Yaas. Also, tens of thousands of lives are lost every year because of cyclones, droughts, floods, landslides, man-animal conflicts, etc. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting that the changes in regional climate have been driven by anthropological factors. The negative impacts linked with climate change may persist over uncertain and an extended timeline, typically greater in duration than most financial or business cycles. 

When the frequency as well as the intensity of climate hazards increases, it can impair the value of assets held by depositors, or impact the supply chains affecting customers’ operations, profitability, and business viability affecting the assessment of credit risk. MoEs recent report claims that the mean temperature in India has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius (during the period 1901-2018). 2010-2019 was the hottest ever recorded decade, with a mean temperature of 0.36 degrees celsius higher than the average. Urban heat waves and smog-filled streets are giving people sleepless nights. Continuous exposure to heat badly affects health, particularly the poor who are unable to afford the means to overcome it. 

MoEs assessment indicates a possible rise in temperature by 4.4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. India lost about 235 sq kilometers of the coastal area because of climate change linked to global sea-level rise, leading to the displacement of around 3.6 million people between 2008-2018. Compared to this 3.9 million were displaced due to Cyclone Amphan alone in 2020. Heavy downpour wreaked havoc in the southern state of Kerala, created by a low-pressure system in the South West Arabian Sea, particularly affecting Pathanamthitta, Kottayam, and Idukki districts. India thus finds itself at the center of two daunting challenges, whether the world achieves SDGs or not depends to a large extent on whether India can achieve its intended targets or not. 

So the country should strive for more proactive steps towards climate action and the developed world should join in the simultaneous struggle of the Global South against poverty and climate change.