India officially takes up its role as chair of the Group of 20 leading economies for the coming year Thursday, and it’s putting climate at the top of the group’s priorities.
Programs to encourage sustainable living and money for countries to transition to clean energy and deal with the effects of a warming world are some of the critical areas that India will focus on during its presidency, experts say. Some say India will also use its new position to boost its climate credentials and act as a bridge between the interests of industrialized nations and developing ones.
The country has made considerable moves toward its climate goals in recent years but is currently one of the world’s top emitters of planet-warming gases.
The G-20, made up of the world’s largest economies, has a rolling presidency with a different member state in charge of the group’s agenda and priorities each year. Experts believe India will use the “big stage” of the G-20 presidency to drive forward its climate and development plans.
The country “will focus heavily on responding to the current and future challenges posed by climate change,” said Samir Sarin, president of the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank. The ORF will anchor the T-20 — a group of think tanks from the 20 member countries whose participants meet alongside the G-20.
Sarin said that India will work to ensure that money is flowing from rich industrialized nations to emerging economies to help them combat global warming, such as a promise of $100 billion a year for clean energy and adapting to climate change for poorer nations that have not yet been fulfilled and a recent pledge to vulnerable countries that there will be a fund for the loss and damage caused by extreme weather.
He added that India would also use the presidency to push its flagship “Mission Life” program that encourages more sustainable lifestyles in the country, which is set to become the most populous in the world soon.
When outgoing chair Indonesia formally handed the presidency to India in Bali last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the opportunity to promote the program, saying it could make “a big contribution” by turning the sustainable living into “a mass movement.”
The impact of lifestyle “has not received as much attention in the global discourse as it should,” said RR Rashmi, a distinguished fellow at The Energy Research Institute in New Delhi. He added that the issue “may get some prominence” at the G-20, which would be a success for the Indian government. Still, critics say the focus on lifestyle changes must be backed by policy to have credibility.
India has been beefing up its climate credentials, with its recent domestic targets to transition to renewable energy more ambitious than the goals it submitted to the U.N. as part of the Paris Agreement, which requires countries to show how they plan to limit warming to temperature targets set in 2015.
Analysts say nations’ climate ambitions and actions — including India’s — are not in line with temperature targets.
Many of India’s big industrialists are investing heavily in renewable energy domestically as well as globally, but the Indian government is also preparing to invest in coal-based power plants at the cost of $33 billion over the next four years.
At the U.N. climate conference last month, India — currently the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases — proposed a phaseout of all fossil fuels and repeatedly emphasized the need to revamp global climate finance. The country says it cannot reach its climate goals and reduce carbon dioxide emissions without significantly more finance from richer nations, a claim that those countries dispute.
Navroz Dubash, the author of several U.N. climate reports and professor at the Centre for Policy Research, said that a key question for many countries is how “emerging economies address development needs and do it in a low carbon pathway” with several in the global south, like India, pointing to a need for outside investment.
