Climate change: can India achieve its goals?

The Indian government has yet to present its latest plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ahead of the next United Nations UK climate summit.

India is the third largest producer of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world, after China and the United States.

With its rapidly growing population and an economy heavily dependent on coal and oil, its emissions are set on a steep upward trajectory unless radical action is taken to curb them.

India resisted setting a target for an overall reduction, stating that industrialized nations should bear a much larger share of the burden as they have contributed much more to emissions over time.

An “emissions intensity” target, which reflects a country’s economic growth, is a fairer way to compare it to other countries, he says.

He set a goal a 33-35% reduction in its emission intensity from 2005 level by 2030.

However, a decrease in carbon intensity does not necessarily mean a reduction in overall emissions.

And India’s relatively rapid economic growth in recent years has been driven by its dependence on fossil fuels, which are responsible for most of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that the global net zero target – in which a country does not increase the overall amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – by 2050 is the minimum needed to maintain the increase. temperature to 1.5 ° C.

And more than 130 countries have publicly promised to fulfill it.

But India is not yet among them.

In 2015, India promised a fivefold increase – up to 175 GW – by 2022 in the generation capacity of its wind, solar and other renewable energy sources, such as small hydroelectric plants.

But by September 2021, it had only reached just over 100 GW.

Also in 2015, India promised to supply 40% of all electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030 – according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2019 this figure was 23. %.

But the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), which measures a country’s policies against the Paris Agreement goals set in 2015, calls this goal “critically insufficient”.

CAT’s Cindy Baxter says developing countries like India need international support to decarbonise their economies and limit the temperature rise to 1.5C in line with the Paris Agreement.

“India has no plans to decarbonise,” Baxter said.

“Nor does it have a conditional goal that identifies where it needs support or indeed how much support it needs.”

India has repeatedly stressed that it wants to bring a third of its land surface under forest cover.

But he didn’t give a timeline for that – and progress has been uneven.

Although there have been replanting initiatives in the southern parts of India, the northeastern region has recently lost forest cover.

The expansion of the green cover acts as a carbon sink.

And India plans to plant enough trees by 2030 to absorb another 2.5-3 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Global Forest Watch – a collaboration between the University of Maryland, Google, the United States Geological Survey and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – estimates that India has lost 18% of its primary forests and 5% of its tree cover between 2001 and 2020.

But Indian government survey data points to a 5.2% increase in forest cover between 2001 and 2019.

This is because the GFW report only includes vegetation taller than 5m (16ft), while India’s official calculation is based on the density of trees on a given area of ​​land.

Further research by David Brown

The COP26 world summit in Glasgow in November is considered crucial if climate change is to be kept under control. Nearly 200 countries are being asked for their plans to reduce emissions and this could lead to major changes in everyday life.

Read more from Reality Check

Send us your questions