Funding Agency: Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change, Government of India
Project Description: This project aims to provide a draft of the chapter on “Climate Change Mitigation” for India’s Third National Communication to the UNFCCC. Climate change mitigation is one of the most important focus areas in climate policy. It encompasses a vast arena of interventions, policies, technological development, and deployment, that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, consequently leading to limiting the rise in global surface temperatures to below certain limits.
The need to limit GHG emissions on a global scale is increasingly becoming an important determinant of energy policy, even in developing countries such as India. This is a consequence of the fact that effective global climate action requires some form of contribution to climate change mitigation from all nations. The nature and scale of such contributions may of course vary based on the formulation of domestic policies in accordance with national circumstances, historical responsibility, and an assessment of the country’s role in the global arena. In this context, India’s contribution to climate change mitigation far exceeds its past and current responsibility in causing climate change, despite the developmental challenges the country faces, which are now further exacerbated by the prolonged COVID-19 crises on the domestic as well as international front.
This is the context in which the assessment of India’s efforts on climate change mitigation will be evaluated and reported. Potential and existing interventions to reduce emissions by either increasing energy efficiency, substituting fossil fuels with green energy technologies, or replacing processes themselves where possible, undertaken in the country since the Second National Communication, will be discussed in this chapter. The chapter will discuss these in the context of India’s role in climate change mitigation as understood within the guiding principles of the UNFCCC, that underline the importance of equity and differentiated responsibility in climate action.