Coal, COP27 And Climate Justice: Why India Is More A Victim Of Climate Change Than The Perpetrator

On November 14, when India submitted its long-term low emission development strategy at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, an Indian government statement described the strategy as “the practical implementation of India’s call for climate justice.”

The country made four specific points during the climate conference. First, it needs more energy to achieve energy security and meet the needs of economic growth. Second, to what extent the country manages to take a low carbon path depends significantly on getting international financial support. Third, India has actually contributed very little to global warming as of now and, therefore, has little responsibility towards mitigation. And fourth, developed countries historically responsible for global warming are not doing what they promised.

“It is the historical, cumulative emissions before a given year that measure responsibility,” India’s environment minister, Bhupendra Yadav, told a minister-level roundtable at the conference, adding that industrialised country members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), such as the US, the UK, Japan and many European countries, “have not met their pre-2020 commitments together and several individually as well.”

The OECD countries are estimated to have caused 80% of global warming since the beginning of the industrial period. “Here, the failure to deliver financial resources to developing countries is an enormous failure,” Yadav was quoted as saying.

A separate media statement issued after India submitted its strategy said that provision of climate finance by developed countries “needs to be considerably enhanced, in the form of grants and concessional loans, ensuring scale, scope and speed, predominantly from public sources, in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”

The media statement spoke of “rational utilisation of national resources” but clarified that “low carbon development transitions in the sector should not impact energy security, energy access and employment.”

This happened barely three days after the Global Carbon Budget report, released at the COP27 conference venue on November 11, reaffirmed the contrasting scene that India has been known for over the past few years – it is one of the energy-poor countries, with a per capita emission intensity of about one-third of the global average, and, at the same time, it is recording the fast growth in emission levels, becoming one of the major global contributors.

According to the report’s estimates, in 2022, China and the European Union (EU) are projected to reduce their emissions by 0.9 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively, while India’s emissions are to increase by 6 percent and the US’s by 1.5  percent. The increase for the rest of the countries together was projected at 1.7 percent. Such a high rate of increase has been one of the reasons some rich countries are trying to pressurise India and China to own up more responsibility. Over the last 10 years, India and China have recorded the highest emission growth rate, the report pointed out. “China’s emissions increased by 1.5 percent per year on average over the last 10 years, dominating the global trend, and India’s emissions increased by 3.8 percent per year, while emissions dec­reased in the EU by 1.8 percent per year and in the US by 1.1 percent per year,” it said.

India ranked fourth among the largest global emitters in 2021, after China (31%), the US (14%) and the European Union, even though the country’s per capita emission is still substantially lower than the three other major contributors.

In the list of top 20 global emitters in 2021, India’s per capita emission of 1.9 tonnes in 2021 stood right at the bottom, even behind Indonesia (2.3), Brazil (2.3), Mexico (3.2) and Vietnam (3.3), said a media release distributed on the occasion of the launch of the report. Saudi Arabia (18.7), the US (14.9), Australia (15.1), Canada (14.3), Russia (12.1) and South Korea (11.9) are the countries with the highest per capita emission.

Even going by the per capita emission from fossil fuel alone, India stands far below. “The per capita fossil CO2 emissions in 2021 were 1.3 tC per person per year for the globe and were 4.0 (USA), 2.2 (China), 1.7 (EU27), and 0.5 (India) tC per person per year for the four highest-emitting countries,” the report said. This means people in India, on an average, have much less access to power when compared to other developed or developing regions. Speaking to Outlook, energy economist and South Asia director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), Vibhuti Garg, said that India’s increasing carbon emission is “very much linked to the country’s higher GDP growth rate,” adding “India’s GDP is growing at 7-8 percent annually and is likely to grow by 6-7 percent in the next few years. This economic growth is driven by industrialisation and urbanisation, which is putting more pressure on energy demand. Given that India has its own domestic coal resources, it is exploiting and mining more such resources.” India did, indeed, launch a major push for renewable energy, especially solar power, in 2015. Its ins­talled capacity of renewable energy increased significantly—its wind energy capacity rose from 23.3 gigawatts (GW) in March 2015 to 40.7 GW in July 2022, and solar energy capacity shot up from only 3.744 GW in March 2015 to 57.7 GW in July 2022. Going by India’s Central Electricity Authority’s roadmap to 2030, and the country’s global commitment, India plans to take its installed capacity of renewable energy to about 410 GW by 2030, increasing it by two and a half times, from 160 GW in June (including large hydroelectric projects). Over the past few months, the government has also been trying to increase focus on two other non-fossil-fuel energy resources: hydrogen and nuclear energy.

Economic reports had earlier hinted that India’s renewable energy target for 2030 would require a million acres of land and over US$ 240 billion; the country is receiving less than half of the annual investment required. Perhaps because of the investment gap, India thinks it still cannot do without coal, at least for the time being. Its installed capacity of power from coal is also likely to increase by another 56 GW – from 210 GW in June to 266 GW in 2029-30.  The Global Carbon Budget report, nevertheless, shows that coal emissions (41% of global emissions) are also projected to rise in the European Union, and many other countries, partly compensated by a drop in the US and China.  Environmentalists and climate activists have often pointed out that it is not the current rate of emission of a particular country that should be considered. The negotiations around climate change adaptation and mitigation measures should consider the historical responsibility of a country. Notwithstanding the massive increase of emissions in China over the past decade, the US stands head and shoulders above all others as the nation most responsible for global warming.

Earlier this year, India’s former chief climate negotiator, Surya Prakash Sethi, told Outlook that India is more a victim of climate change than the perpetrator and that India’s priorities should be climate change adaptation measures, not mitigation. “Our emissions go up, their (developed countries’) emissions go down – that’s the way it should be,” Sethi said. Garg, however, thinks that India should look into renewable energy. “India has to import more than 80 percent of its oil and 50 percent of gas, which in the last few months have proven costly and unreliable. Generation based on fossil fuels is expensive and carbon-intensive. India must build clean energy alternatives to meet its energy demand,” says Garg. While India’s wind power capacity expansion has stagnated, the push for ‘green hydrogen’ and nuclear energy opens both a world of opportunities and a can of worms, as the claims of both as sources of ‘clean energy’ remain contested.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Coal, COP27 and Climate Justice")