THE GIST of Editorial for UPSC Exams : 20 December 2019 (Climate Change and India (The Hindu))

Climate Change and India (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Environment
Prelims level: Climate Change
Mains level: Challenges towards climate change

Context

The 25th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held in Spain from 2nd December this year. CoP 25 holds a lot of significance as countries prepare to move from pre 2020 period under the Kyoto protocol to post 2020 period under the Paris Agreement.
India is all set to stress upon the need for fulfilling pre 2020 commitments by developed countries and that pre 2020 implementation gaps should not present an additional burden to developing countries in the post 2020 period.

How global carbon is interlocked?

Global Carbon system is an interlocked system as the global transition to low carbon systems and the resultant spillover effects, from changes in one economy to changes in another economy, changes in politics in one place to changes in politics in another place, etc.
This makes important how we bring about the transition to a low carbon economy in India as India is a large economy, market, second largest population and it can play an important role in being part of these positive spillover effects.

Is India a major contributor?

India is not responsible for the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere as it contributes to only 6 or 7% of global emissions but we are one of the most vulnerable countries.

What are the adaptation and mitigation methods?

In adaptation, our focus should therefore be on understanding what our development deficits are. For example, to say that we need to improve, find a way for cleaner transportation, shouldn’t actually lead to a conclusion that it should lead to more electric vehicles – the first priority has to be improved and more accessible public transport.
We need to understand these development deficits from a multi objective point of view, in terms of economics and access, in terms of local pollutants like air pollutants, climate change and mitigation, and liveability of cities, we need this more multi-faceted and analytical framework.
On the mitigation side, we have to be careful as we may not be fully exploring the scope of intersections between 'a low carbon agenda' and 'a development agenda'.
For example, the way we design our cities: we want more sustainable cities, we want cities with less congestion, with more public transport because we want cities that are more liveable. Those kinds of cities will also automatically be low carbon cities.

Key challenges:

The problem for India is hedging its future, not simply what we consume now or what we expect to gain in immediate terms.
The strategy is an ongoing game and it is not a static number - it changes over time - we need to continually monitor and study it.
Even though India’s performance in NDC is good, we cannot respond with more commitments in our NDC until we see serious commitments at the international level.

Way forward

Recognising climate change as a global collective action problem:
If one country is honourable in the extreme, and cuts its emissions to the bone, that is going to be of little use if the others do not follow suit.
They will suffer the consequences of climate change despite the extent of their sacrifice or effort.
Making climate change and global warming the top agenda in our Foreign policy:
This is a critical move we need to make and the sooner we do it, the greater is the benefit that we will draw from our own climate actions.
India will probably exceed the NDC pledges, because for reasons like urban congestion and air pollution, we will want to move in the direction of low carbon anyway, quite apart from climate change.
This is because our per capita energy consumption levels are extremely low and not something compatible with the development and lifestyle that we wish for in India.
The real dilemma is if we want to increase energy use at a time when globally we are trying to shift to a low carbon system.
At the same time, there is another big challenge - providing jobs when automation and artificial intelligence are growing in power and capacity.

Conclusion

If India has to decarbonise while meeting its development goals, what is important is that the new investments go in the direction of decarbonising, but only after taking into account possible synergies and trade-offs with other development objectives.Therefore, India should not be thinking about climate change adaptation as a single technology transition. Instead, we should think about jobs, energy and pollution questions together.
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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) Which of the following concepts is used to find the value by which the cost of a good has risen from its cost in the base year?
(a) GDP Deflator
(b) Real Gross Domestic Product
(c) Nominal Gross Domestic Product
(d) Gross Value Added (GVA)