The climate 'dividend'

Lockdown highlights the criticality of climate change agenda

Clean air, unrestricted views of mountain ranges hidden for decades, and the return of thriving bird life in urban areas have been unexpected upsides of the lockdown, and they offer a more compelling case for climate change activists than any scientific model. This unexpected environmental dividend offers a useful template for climate-change policies. The critical caveat is that no agenda can be predicated on the cessation of virtually all economic activity, given the hardships it imposes on the poor. However, it is possible to imagine a sustainable future even with India’s massive and growing population. As an article in McKinsey Quarterly points out, thanks to large stimulus packages there should be cheap money available to invest in climate-friendly energy and infrastructure. 

In terms of a domestic agenda, two elements suggest themselves. At the policy level, the priority must be enforcing the challenging 2020-30 targets India, a coal-fired economy, has set for itself under the Paris climate change accord. India set three major goals: To increase non-fossil fuels’ share to 40 per cent of electricity generation capacity; reduce the emission intensity of the economy by 33-35 per cent from the 2005 level; and create an additional carbon sink of 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through additional forest and tree cover. If the government’s claims that it may outperform these targets are correct, then re-focusing on this agenda is critical when the lockdown ends. This will involve urgently addressing long-standing anomalies in the solar power eco-system, the main renewable energy source. Most solar companies are in the red on account of the aggressive (some say unrealistic) price bids by new entrants at progressively lower levels, which discourages distribution companies from buying from existing producers. The scrapping of bids for solar capacities through 2019 and the early months of 2020 do not bode well for the target of achieving 100,000 Mw of solar capacity by 2022 (the country has achieved about a third of that target so far). Creating a carbon sink is a bigger challenge. The India State of Forest Report of 2019 suggested that the supposed increase in forest cover is misleading because the term includes plantations and masks a marked decline in the Northeast with its rich biodiversity. Enforcing no-go areas for manufacturing in endangered forest areas is vital not least because it will also extend some measure of protection to the rights of India’s disenfranchised tribal population.

Beyond the larger agenda are granular policies for the Centre and states to consider. Support to industry on revival could be linked to adopting pollution-free processes and recycling. It is fairly easy, for instance, to adopt waste-water recycling in modern industry. The prime minister had highlighted the perils of plastic in several radio broadcasts. It is vital that this initiative, which has yielded some positive responses, should not be reversed in a low oil-price regime (petrochemicals being the basic input for plastic). Equally, cleaner, urban air owing to lower vehicular movement should spur state and municipal administrations to strengthen public transport capacities, including e-buses, to enable gig and migrant workers better access to their workplaces than ad hoc, polluting private options. Getting started on setting up e-vehicle infrastructure (charging stations and so on) would also go a long way toward encouraging more people to examine this mode of vehicle ownership. At the corporate level, encouraging enhanced telecommuting, a reduction in air travel, and partial work-from-home policies are obvious solutions to lowering air pollution, with all the concomitant benefits on public-health outcomes. Learning from the Covid-19 experience is as vital as coping with it.