Hot button issue: How the scale of climate challenge is increasing

News that the year 2024 was India’s hottest since records began in 1901 come as no surprise, but policymakers urgently need to take notice. A granular look at the numbers shows that five years in the past 15 have been recorded as the hottest since the start of the 20th century. To be sure, India was not an outlier. The World Meteorological Organization has said that 2024 was globally the warmest on record, exceeding the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5 degrees centigrade of warming above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900). Much, of course, has been said on the Western industrial economies’ contribution to the stock of carbon in the atmosphere, which is causing global warming and these countries’ perfidious abdication of responsibilities in aiding the developing world to create viable adaptation strategies. But at the heart of India’s problem is the growing reliance on coal as a source of energy to power the growing needs of households and industry.

 

Though India takes pride in the fact that renewables-based energy (RE) accounts for 46.3 per cent of installed capacity, it, in fact, accounts for less than 10 per cent of actual generation. India remains heavily dependent on coal, which accounts for 77 per cent of energy generation, according to the government’s statistics. This makes India the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, overtaking the European Union in 2023, although the country accounts for just 8 per cent of emission, significantly behind China (31.5 per cent) and the United States (13 per cent). The problems of integrating solar and wind power into national electricity grids are principally driven by the absence of viable storage capacity (given the variable nature of RE generation) and the age-old one of asymmetric power pricing, which makes buying RE complicated. At the same time, a somewhat misleading picture of India’s forest cover suggests that the size of India’s carbon sink may be exaggerated. The latest India State of the Forest Report (ISFR) says India’s forest cover has increased and now covers about 25 per cent of the country. The report also said India had, as a result, achieved an additional carbon sink of 2.29 billion tonnes over 2005 levels, thereby meeting its Paris Agreement commitments seven years ahead of target. The problem here is that the government counts plantations as forests and such areas do not act as efficient carbon sinks because of the lack of carbon-absorbing undergrowth.

 

At the other end of the spectrum is growing urbanisation and industrialisation. Poorly planned urban expansion that relies on cutting trees and reducing green spaces and urban water bodies without balancing the mitigating effects of greenery and heat-resistant techniques is making India’s cities unbearable in summer and creating a vicious cycle of greater demand for fossil-fuel powered cooling. The inefficient system of environmental controls on factory emission adds to the crisis. Though India’s net-zero commitments are comfortingly set in a distant year of 2070, each year breaks new heat records, impacting human and agricultural productivity. This urgently requires India’s policymakers to reimagine the country’s climate action more realistically. The fact that India’s per capita carbon emission is less than half the global average should not be used to suggest that the climate crisis is not at its doorstep.