As India works on its voluntary commitments to reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Indian experts have explained how the country could cut its carbon emissionsfrom short-lived climate pollutants by nearly three-fourths using low-cost methods and, in the process, transform the lives of the poor.
The US, EU and China are among the major countries which have declared their commitments; the global community is waiting to see what India does.
India has already indicated that it is going to take minimalist steps as regards its “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” or INDCs (as they are known in United Nations negotiations), as environment minister Prakash Javadekar said. India will take a further cut on its emissions intensity–the amount of energy used to produce a unit of GDP–from 20-25% on 2005 levels to around 35-40%.
To an extent, current science on climate change justifies this policy, as speakers observed at the sixth annual climate conference, organised by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai, on equity in the forthcoming UN climate summit in Paris this December.
TISS has developed a “carbon budget” for both industrial and developing countries, which provides a clear glimpse of what each is entitled to emit in an equitable framework.
The total amount of emissions from the start of the industrial revolution in 1850 till 2100 is 641 gigatonnes of carbon equivalent (GtC, 1 Gigatonne = 1 billion tonnes), according to Tejal Kanitkar of the Centre for Climate Change at TISS.
If the world’s climate is not to spin out of control when mean temperatures rise by 2?C above 1850 levels, there is a total budget of 270 GtC till 2100, as against 371 GtC already emitted from that baseline till 2011.
