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Climate Action: How India's Plans are Falling Short

Climate action is crucial as climate change impacts become increasingly severe in India. The new government needs to engage in meaningful efforts that include the communities most affected by climate change.

By sushmita, IndiaSpend
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Climate Action - India's plans are falling short

Climate Action: How India's Plans are Falling Short | Representative image | Photo courtesy: Puskar Dahal: iStockPhoto.com

Climate Action: What India Can Do

Even as general elections in India continued through the months of April to June, heatwave to severe heatwave conditions prevailed in northern and western India and in parts of eastern India. Many of these areas started experiencing heatwaves around May 18.

With the onset of the south-west monsoon, India finds itself in an odd extreme weather scenario: On the one hand, people have died of heat and on the other, many states particularly in the north fear floods and find themselves ill-equipped to tackle them. On June 28, for instance, the national capital region of Delhi received 235.5 mm of rainfall, the highest-single day amount in June in 88 years.

IndiaSpend spoke to experts and activists to understand the changes and developments in the country’s climate, and its environmental regulatory regime over the past decade, and where its policies fell short. This is crucial for the new government and for climate action as the next few years are critical for the Paris targets.

Climate Action Framework in India

India’s climate action plans consist of two elements: adaptation and mitigation. While mitigation has found a lot of focus, not enough attention has gone into planning adaptation, as IndiaSpend reported in December 2023. In terms of commitments and goals, there is a National Action Plan on Climate Change and its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDCs).

India’s Climate Goals


  • To put forward and further propagate a healthy and sustainable way of living based on traditions and values of conservation and moderation.

  • To adopt a climate friendly and a cleaner path than the one followed hitherto by others at corresponding level of economic development.

  • To reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33-35% by 2030 from 2005 level.

  • To achieve about 40% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030 with the help of transfer of technology and low-cost international finance including from Green Climate Fund (GCF).

  • To create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.

  • To better adapt to climate change by enhancing investments in development programmes in sectors vulnerable to climate change, particularly agriculture, water resources, Himalayan region, coastal regions, health and disaster management.

  • To mobilise domestic and new and additional funds from developed countries to implement the above mitigation and adaptation actions in view of the resource required and the resource gap. 

  • To build capacities, create domestic framework and international architecture for quick diffusion of cutting-edge climate technology in India and for joint collaborative R&D for such future technologies.

Source: India’s INDCs

India updated its INDC targets in August 2022, seven years since it first submitted its targets to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The update included two new targets:

  1. To reduce the emissions intensity of the country’s GDP by 45% by 2030 as against the earlier target of 33-35% (compared to 2005 emission levels). (Emissions intensity is the emission rate of a given pollutant relative to the intensity of a specific activity. For instance, grams of carbon dioxide released per megajoule of energy produced)

  2. To achieve about 50% cumulative installed electric power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources (including nuclear) by 2030, as against the 40% targeted earlier.

About a year later, in December 2023, it said that it had achieved the two targets originally mentioned in the INDCs, well ahead of deadline:

  1. To reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33-35% by 2030 from 2005 level; and

  2. To achieve about 40% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030 (As on October 31, 2023, the cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources was 186.46 MW; this was 43.81% of the total cumulative electric power installed capacity.)

Despite these components as well as many state-level action plans, India’s climate action policies are often driven by “opportunism”, as argued in a 2021 paper by Navroz Dubash, leading climate researcher and Chair of the Advisory Council of the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC), an independent research and action group based in Delhi, and others.

“In my opinion, climate change became a pretext for the government to bring businesses, whether in Gujarat or the rest of India,” notes Alok Shukla, member of the convenor collective of Chhattisgar

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