India’s climate change story

INDIA HAS readied its draft of the Biennial Update Report on climate change for the UN. It details, growth in India’s greenhouse gas emissions, what India is doing to tackle them and the climate change impacts that India is already witnessing.

The annual mean temperature for the period 1901-2015 over India has shown a significant increasing trend of 0.63°C per hundred years. This has led to changes in the climate, including exacerbated extreme weather events. The frequency with which rainstorm events occur has increased between 1951-2015. The frequency of dry days has also increased simultaneously.

India is committed to improve the greenhouse gas emission intensity of its GDP by 20-25% over 2005 levels by 2020 and to bring it to 33-35% below 2005 levels by 2030. This allows India’s emissions to grow but at a slower pace than before while the economy expands. India’s emissions from the energy and industrial sector are increasing at a pace higher than that from agriculture.

Forests and croplands lock emissions in the land and prevent them from entering the atmosphere. India has committed to increase its forest cover to do so. But, between 20142010 the emissions sequestered fell dramatically from 200,036.31 giga tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent to 68,215.

One successful scheme of the government that has helped keep the rate of growth of emissions from industries in check is the Perform, Achieve and Trade or PAT scheme which works on improving energy efficiency. In the first round of the scheme, eight sectors of the industry collectively did better than the set target to save 8.680 million tonnes of oil equivalent energy between 2012-15. The overall energy intensity of the economy 0.273 joule per rupee in 2011-12 to 0.240 in 2016-17. The advantages of increasing the share of renewable power in the energy pie would become visible in the next update by India in 2020.