India Pledges Significant Carbon Emission Reductions by 2030 – Is it enough?

October 9, 2015 – The third-largest greenhouse gas emitting nation has set a series of target reductions that will mean 3.59 billion tons of carbon dioxide will not be added to the atmosphere by India between now and 2030.

India is not capping its carbon emissions. Instead it is playing the same game that Australia and Canada have to date, talking about emission intensity reductions per unit of gross domestic production. In India this target is 35% less than 2005 levels by 2030. At the same time India is pledging to meet a 40% renewable energy target by 2030.

India is the last major government to announce targeted reductions prior to the COP2015 meetings being held in Paris in December. But intensity reductions are really meaningless when you take into consideration projections for India’s future economic growth. That’s because India is expected to become the world’s third largest economy and the world’s most populous country by 2030. Currently the country stands eighth.

So if your economy is growing at a 7.2% clip with increasing gross domestic production then all you are doing through intensity reductions is offsetting that growth, or in terms of carbon emissions, staying in exactly the same place.

It should be noted that the plan is short on policy and the setting of target intensity reductions for specific segments of the Indian economy. A senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, Navroz Dubash, describes the carbon intensity goal as short on details and “conservative at best.” Dubash expresses uncertainty about whether India will get locked-in “into a high-carbon growth pathway.”

As a Canadian living under a Conservative government these past few years that also measures carbon intensity rather than overall emission reductions, it is obvious that the Indian plan is flawed. Canada’s net emissions have hardly moved downward since 2005 even though the government in its latest report claims a 29% intensity reduction. At Copenhagen Canada had committed to a 17% reduction in carbon emissions from 2005 to 2020.  But in fact as recent as two years ago greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in Canada, up 1.5% in 2013 and 4% between 2009 and 2013, or when projected to 2020, 20% above Canada’s Copenhagen commitment.

It sounds like India may commit the same folly as my country by measuring the wrong thing.

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