With global temperature increase likely to overshoot the “well below 2 degree Celsius” goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the events of the past few years portends a huge and expanding danger.

• Though nobody is a stranger to the adverse impacts of a warming planet, the IPCC special report had a clear message for resource poor and vulnerable countries such as India that it would be among those most adversely affected.
• As a relatively poor country that is vulnerable to climate change, India will be among those most adversely affected if warming exceeds 1.5 degree celsius.
• It is now clearer than ever before that many of the adverse impacts of climate change are unavoidable.
• South Asia, particularly India is a hotspot, and will exposed to multiple and overlapping hazards as the planet warms.
• The impactsis considerable-intensified droughts and water stress, heatwaves, habitat degradation, and reduced crop yields.
• Rising temperature and the variations in rainfall will impact water supplies. The overall impact of climate change on water resources will manifest as a rise in floods and droughts.
• The intensity and area affected by floods, river floods due to snowmelt and coastal flooding due to sea level rise-will increase considerably.

Acting On Climate Change:

• India has been stepping up on its efforts to slow down the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to impacts that are already being experienced.
• In 2008, India launched the National Action Plan on Climate Change.
• Eight missions: energy, energy efficiency, forestry, sustainable habitat, water, agriculture, Himalayan ecosystem, and developing strategic knowledge for climate change—form the core of the multi-pronged, long- term, and integrated strategies for addressing climate change.
• Besides a national level plan, 32 states and union territories have prepared state level climate action plans.
• These plans comprising programmes in sectors such as health, industries, disaster management, tourism, and coastal are focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change while addressing broader development goals.
• The progress however has been uneven. Most of the efforts have been focused on the energy-related missions. Though efforts are underway to align policies and programmes to goals set out in the national action plans. Financial and technological constraints have hampered the effective implementation of the state plans.
• As part of its pledges under the Paris Agreement, India has committed to increase the share of non-fossil fuel power generating capacity to 40 per cent of its installed total power capacity by 2030.
• India has also committed to reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33 to 35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 level.
• Earlier in 2010, India took a voluntary pledge to reduce the emission intensity Of its GDP by 20- 25 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.
• Between 2005 and 2014, India has reduced the emission intensity of the economy by 21 per Cent.
• An analysis by Australia-based think tank Institute for Energy’ Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) finds that India is likely to achieve its energy capacity and emissions intensity goals by 2020, that is a decade before the deadline Of 2030 it set in its NDC.

What Next?

• Material resources and energy are the drivers of economic progress.
• Growing the economy and bridging the development gap will inevitably require increasing India’s consumption of material resources and energy.
• A recent assessment, Global Resources Outlook 2019, by the International Resource Panel, a United Nations Environment-sponsored science body, reports that the global extraction and processing of material resources— biomass, fossil fuels, metals, and non-
• metallic minerals—contributes to more than 50 per cent or the greenhouse gas emissions. As a lower-middle income country, India’s material footprint is smaller than its high and upper-middle income counterparts.
• However, it is already experiencing the adverse impacts of a materials- intensive growth model: polluted air, water stress and climate change- induced weather events.
• Clearly, as India moves ahead urbanising at a rapid pace, building the nearly 70 per cent of its yet unbuilt infrastructure, increasmg its manufacturing base, creating jobs in the non-agricultural and mining sectors, will need to transition to production and consumption systems.
• It is clear that India cannot afford to adopt the growth models that have underpinned the rise of developed industrialised economies developing economies such as China.

Climate change will require economy-wide transformation. India will need to make dramatic changes across the spectrum-energy, transportation, urban and agriculture systems. It will require investing in human capital, innovation and research and development. This is the moment for India to invest in re-skilling the 500,000 people who depend directly and indirectly on coal mining as the energy mix changes. It must invest in innovations that minimise the social cost of a climate-induced transformation of the economy. It is about creating more sustainable economies. And for a country such as India, filling the backlog of development in a climate constrained world poses a real and immediate Challenge. The path forward must focus on creating wealth that will provide the resilience to deal with the real and physical challenges that a warming earth presents, and to sustain the economic growth that will ensure a better life for all its people. For India, it has to be about creating the capacities to seize the opportunities that the climate crisis presents.