India to release updated climate action plan ahead of COP30 meet in Brazil

Under the Paris Agreement, every country is mandated to finalise and submit these NDCs every five years, with every successive NDC representing a progression over the existing one. The NDCs have to specify the set of actions the country is taking to fight climate change. The first set of NDCs were submitted around the time the Paris Agreement was finalised in 2015, and these were then updated around the year 2020. Countries are now supposed to submit the third edition of their NDCs by the end of this year.

India’s updated NDC is unlikely to promise anything new apart from making an upward revision of the three targets it has committed itself to in its existing NDC, the sources said. India’s climate action plan is focused on three objectives — progressively reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP (emissions per unit of GDP), progressively increase the share of clean and renewable sources in its energy mix, and expand tree and forest cover to enhance their carbon-capturing capabilities.

In its first NDC, India had promised to reduce its emissions intensity by 33 to 35 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, and to ensure that at least 40 per cent of its installed electricity generation capacity in the year 2030 came from non-fossil fuel sources. In its second NDC, submitted in 2022, India had made an upward revision in both these targets.

The emission intensity reduction goal was increased to 45 per cent from 33 to 35 per cent, while the non-fossil fuel share in electricity target was upgraded to 50 per cent.

In July this year, India announced that the share of non-fossil fuels, like solar, wind and nuclear, in its total electricity generation installed capacity had gone beyond 50 per cent. It meant that India had fulfilled one of its three NDC commitments five years ahead of schedule.

Most likely, the emissions intensity target would also have been achieved by now, though the numbers for recent years are not available. The latest emission intensity data pertains only to 2020, and India had already achieved a 36 per cent reduction on 2005 baseline by that time.

India had made a third commitment as well, and it was unchanged in the first two NDCs. It had promised to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes through expansion of forest and tree cover. When new data on forests comes later this year, it was likely to show that India had achieved this target as well, may be, by 2023 itself. The biennial State of the Forest Report for 2023 had shown that the carbon stock in India’s forests and trees had already increased by about 2.29 billion tonnes from 2005 levels by the year 2021. Past trends show that India has been creating about 150 million tonnes of additional carbon sink every year on an average between 2017 and 2021. If this same trend has continued post 2021 as well, the target of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of additional carbon stock would already have been met.

The third NDC would most likely make further upward revision of these three targets, to be achieved by 2035, officials said. No new element was expected to be introduced, they said.

India has also said that its third NDC might “reflect the disappointment of the climate finance outcome at COP29 in Baku”, clearly hinting that in the absence of adequate financial resources being made available the developing countries, the commitments for 2035 were unlikely to be very ambitious.

This is also one of the reasons India was in no hurry to announce its third NDC to meet a September-end deadline for its contents to be included in the ‘NDC Synthesis Report’ which the UN Climate Change prepares every year to assess where the cumulative actions of all the countries was taking the world in its fight against climate change.

Last year’s synthesis report said that if all the actions mentioned in every NDC was fully implemented by the year 2030, including those that were conditional on international finance and technology being made available, it was likely to result in a 5.9 per cent reduction in emissions on 2019 levels. This is extremely insufficient compared to the minimum of 43 per cent reduction that is required to keep alive any hopes of keeping temperature rise below 1.5 degree Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the main goal of the Paris Agreement.

If the conditional elements in the NDCs were excluded, emissions in 2030 would end up being 0.8 per cent higher than in 2019, it said.

Less than 50 countries have so far submitted their third NDCs. At least a few more are likely to do so on Wednesday to coincide with a special meeting on climate action called by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York on the sidelines of the ongoing annual UN General Assembly session.