Climate change & India’s key role

India’s sheer size and the accelerating rate of its emissions, which defy a global trend of decline, appear to make India the make-or-break player when it comes to climate change

Earlier this month, the UN climate chief Christina Figueres told the media that an Indian pledge to voluntarily cut carbon emissions is “critically important” to any meaningful agreement at a crucial UN climate summit in Paris in December.

As IndiaSpend reported recently, India has bucked a global trend of declining CO2 emissions to emerge as the world’s fastest-growing major polluter and is the single most critical player when it comes to global climate change.

This was revealed in the latest edition of British Petroleum’s comprehensive Statistical Review of World Energy, which showed that for the first time in history, India’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which had increased by 8.1% in 2014, accounted for the largest share of global emissions growth.

Global forecasts predict that emissions growth in developed regions, such as the US, will remain negligible over the period 2010 to 2040, while developing nations like India and China will account for the bulk of emissions growth.

The forecast placed India’s average emissions growth rate at 2.3% (the highest among major polluters). India’s emissions growth rate is racing ahead at a time when emissions are either declining or being cut significantly by other major polluters.

The problem is not just India’s overwhelming reliance on coal but the dismal efficiency levels of its coal-based power plants, which fall way below global benchmarks on nearly all counts, as a research study by the Centre for Science and Environment revealed.

Below are voluntary emissions pledges made by member nations ahead of theupcoming 2015 Conference of Parties (CoP) of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Termed Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDCs), these pledges signify the extent of the willingness (or lack of it) among nations to tackle climate change.

INDCs are largely what will determine the outcome at what has been described as the most important climate negotiation in history. While every major polluter has submitted its INDCs (the final deadline is October 31), India is conspicuous by its absence.

Citing India’s “development needs,” Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment and Climate Change, told the media that while India would be submitting its pledge to the UN, it will not set a date for peak emissions. However, he added that India’s INDCs would be “much more ambitious” than the world expects.

International climate change negotiations often failed because of this gridlock: Developing nations point to past emissions and want rich nations to make bigger cuts, while the latter point to future emissions and insist developing nations step on the brakes first. Partly owing to this, successive Indian governments have consistently thwarted international climate deals.

Human activity over the last two hundred years or so–above all, economic growth fuelled by fossil fuels–has, so far, increased the average temperature of the planet by 0.8 0C, a phenomenon we now call global warming.

The scientific consensus today puts 20C as the absolute maximum temperature increase that the world can afford without setting off dangerous and irreversible warming that could endanger human survival itself.

Projected impacts on India of a global temperature increase from 20C to 40C show massive disruptions that could have a catastrophic effect: extreme heat waves, changes in rainfall patterns and persistent droughts affecting food security, impact of sea-level rise on cities and the large coastal population, freshwater scarcity owing to glacier melt, rise in vector-borne diseases and overall distress migration and conflict.

Climate change is not the futuristic scenario many imagine: some of its impacts, such as heat waves and increasingly erratic rainfall, are already being felt in India, as IndiaSpend has reported, and expected to worsen.

Analyses of the data presented by the authoritative Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that anywhere from 80-90% of remaining fossil fuel reserves should be left in the ground for the world to even have a chance of limiting global warming to below 20C.

Recent research shows that if carbon emissions continue at present rates, the 20C barrier may be breached as early as 2036. India’s sheer size and the accelerating rate of its emissions, which defy a global trend of decline, appear to make India the make-or-break player when it comes to climate change.

Speculating about India’s stance at the Paris talks, former environment minister Jairam Ramesh recently wrote: “India must do things on its own because of its own vulnerability to climate change and because in many areas it has the potential to exercise technological leadership… If the world wants to help, well and good. But we should not be waiting for that to happen.”

By Sajai Jose