An agenda for India at Paris meet

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) meeting to be held in Paris (COP-21) in December 2015 is expected to establish a new international agreement on climate change. The main bone of contention lies in the differentiation and sharing of the remaining carbon space in order to avoid catastrophic warming.

China and the US, which are the world's largest CO2 emitters, have recently announced an agreement to restrict emissions by 2030.

The question now is what could be India's strategy in the Paris negotiations? Most recent discussions on the subject appear to assume that India's development aspirations go hand in hand with increasing carbon emissions.

In a recent study, experts at Centre for Study of Science Technology and Policy (CSTEP), Bengaluru, has framed the question differently. They have assumed that the overall vision of the country is "sustainable development". In the initial analysis, they used inclusivity, energy security, efficiency, and health as the cornerstones of a future energy policy. Inclusivity means that all rural and urban households would have access to modern energy sources and electricity. In addition, there should be a minimum threshold supply to all households.

Energy security implies that our energy system should not be vulnerable to potential disruptions in fuel supply due to geopolitical reasons. At present, India imports most of its oil and we may not have any significant alternatives in the near future. Moreover, even our electricity production is increasingly dependent on imported fuel as imports of coal, uranium and natural gas are increasing continuously.

In our scramble for energy generation, we tend to underestimate the health impact of pollutants emitted from thermal power plants, vehicles and biomass. Thermal power generation, from coal in particular, leads to emissions of particulate matter (PM), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx). At present, India has standards for regulating PM emissions. However, there are no regulations for SO2 and NOx.

Sooner or later, we will have to impose stricter regulations for emissions from thermal power plants and motor vehicles. We cannot afford to go China's way in air quality.

CSTEP has developed future energy trajectories that show that if we want to achieve the four cornerstone policy objectives mentioned above, 40-50 percent of our electricity generation would have to come from fossil-free sources by 2030.

For comparison, at present, about 23 per cent of our electricity comes from fossil-free sources. The economy will become much more efficient and it requires lower energy to make one unit of the gross domestic product (GDP). Interestingly, the pathways that achieve these societal objectives also turn out to generate lower CO2 emissions.

It is important to realise that these transformations happen without imposing any restrictions on CO2 emissions. Instead, these are driven by the aspirations of inclusivity, energy security, cleaner air, and a shift to sustainable development.

India, therefore, has the opportunity to carve a unique developmental trajectory that ensures quality of life to its citizens without locking itself into a high-emissions pathway.

The question is not whether India should target its per capita CO2 emissions to be comparable with those of China or the US. Instead, we should ask what India should do to achieve a sustainable and good quality of life for all its citizens.

This could serve as an alternative paradigm for other developing countries as well. And this could be India's distinctive contribution at COP-21.