India only G20 nation on track to meet Paris pact’s 2°C goal

NEW DELHI: India is the only country among G20 nations which is on track to meet what it had promised in 2015 under the Paris Agreement on climate change unlike the top three emitters — China, the US and the EU. India’s track record of being the only “2°C compatible” country was flagged in a report released on Wednesday by a coalition of 14 global thinktanks, including TERI, which showed that the other 19 leading and emerging economies were far from achieving their goals.



Though China has declared that it will be carbon neutral by 2060, it is in the 'highly insufficient' category according to the climate action tracker while India is 'compatible' with the 2-degree warming goal.



Of course, India is not on track for a 1.5-degree Celsius pathway - a target which gained momentum only in 2018 when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with a report showing how the 2-degree Celsius goal (keeping the global average temperature rise within 2 degree Celsius by 2100 from the pre-industrial level) would be devastating for the globe. It was assessed that drought and heavy rainfall risks would be much higher at the 2-degree Celsius mark than at 1.5 degree Celsius.

In fact, no country has 1.5-degree Celsius aligned renewable energy targets. India's renewable energy targets have, however, become an example. "India is the only G20 country which is on a track consistent to move the world to a 2-degree Celsius warming future, though not a 1.5-degree warming future," TERI director general Ajay Mathur said.

He added that the country was able to "move the needle of its carbon emissions trajectory through the largescale adoption of renewable electricity".

The Climate Transparency Report 2020 of the coalition, released ahead of the G20 summit over the weekend, showed the G20 countries had lost around 2.20 lakh lives and suffered economic losses of $2.6 trillion due to extreme weather events in 20 years during 1999-2018.

Though India reported the second highest annual average deaths (2,925) after Russia (2,939) during the period, its average annual death per million of inhabitants was much less. In economic terms, extreme weather events caused loss of $14 billion annually in India.

The US, which de-linked itself from the Paris Agreement goals under the Trump administration, however, suffered the biggest economic loss at over $51 billion annually during the 20-year period.

The report showed that the G20's energy-related CO2 emissions are projected to decrease by 7.5% in 2020 compared to 2019 due to pandemic-linked slowdown which saw collapse in aviation emission.

This decline will, however, not sustain next year as the world's leading economies are now directing trillions of dollars towards Covid-19 recovery packages where a "significant proportion is going to fossil fuel industries without climate conditions, risking clean energy opportunities in the coming decade".

Referring to India’s renewable energy push, Mathur said, “It is possible that future growth of electricity-generating capacity in India will be based on renewables and storage because of the price advantages. India now has to enable development of electric transport and of (renewable) electricity and green hydrogen use in industry.”

He added, “This experience of enabling growth in the power, transport and industry sectors to be based on zero-carbon-emissions technologies would have huge replicative value in other G20 countries.”