Climate change and India

What India has promised

• India's Nationally Determined Contribution sets three targets: one for emission intensity, one for the share of non-fossil electricity capacity, and one for the carbon sink.
• The pledge filed in 2015 asked for intensity down 33 to 35 per cent and 40 per cent non-fossil capacity; the 2022 update raised these to 45 and about 50 per cent and left the sink target untouched.
• Non-fossil capacity counts what is installed, not what is generated, so the share of electricity actually supplied is lower.
• India reports its progress to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in a Biennial Transparency Report.

Counting the sink

• The sink target is an additional store of carbon in forest and tree cover, counted from 2005 and reported in tonnes of CO₂ equivalent.
• The Forest Survey of India (FSI) assesses forest and tree resources every two years and publishes the India State of Forest Report.
• Because forest cover is counted by canopy rather than by origin, a plantation and a natural forest enter the figure alike.
• The Green India Mission, MISHTI (Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Tangible Incomes) and Nagar Van Yojana are the schemes through which the Centre supports States in raising cover.

How adaptation is planned, and paid for

• The National Action Plan on Climate Change, 2008, and the State Action Plans on Climate Change beneath it are where India's adaptation planning is written.
• Planning stops at the State: there is no framework below it, though climate risk differs from one village to the next.
• Adaptation carries no budget line of its own, so the works are paid for out of existing schemes such as the rural employment guarantee.

What a Heat Action Plan is

• Heat Action Plans are the instrument India actually uses against extreme heat, written city by city and district by district rather than nationally.
• The National Disaster Management Authority's (NDMA) guidelines of 2019 ask a city to assess what drives its urban heat island effect and to write the fixes into its plan.
• The India Cooling Action Plan sits alongside, pushing energy efficient buildings and refrigerants of low global warming potential in vehicle air conditioning.
• Heat falls hardest on those who work outdoors, which is the burden a plan written city by city has to reach.

The Himalaya is losing its ice

• Meltwater widens crevasses and, at the glacier bed, can destabilise large blocks of ice.
• A retreating glacier strips the snow that cushioned the rock walls above it, leaving rock and ice perched on bare slopes.
• Thawing permafrost removes the ice that cements rock and sediment together.

A slope failure, and what it becomes

• A glacial lake outburst flood begins when a lake's natural dam fails; the Nepal disaster of August 2026 began instead with a slope failure of ice and rock, which is why it is not called one.
• A debris flow erodes riverbanks and gains mass and momentum as it travels, which is why experts called this one a sediment bomb.

A moraine dammed lake, and how it fails

• Many glacial lakes are held not by bedrock but by moraine, the loose rock and sediment a glacier leaves behind.
• The South Lhonak flood of 2023 destroyed the Teesta-III dam, though a modelling study in 2019 had flagged the valley as at serious risk.

The lakes, mapped

• The Glacial Lake Atlas of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) maps 28,043 lakes in the Himalayan river basins, almost 73 per cent of them outside India.
• The NRSC works under the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and the Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
• Most mapped lakes lying outside India makes data sharing with China and Nepal part of the warning system rather than a courtesy.

How the risk is ranked

• The Central Water Commission, the Centre's technical authority on water resources, gives 30 of 100 marks in its risk index to downstream exposure, since risk lies where hazard meets exposure.

Why monitoring is not preparedness

• Nepal's warning system issues alerts when it detects rain, and the August flood did not begin with rain.
• The flow's seismic signal was first read as an earthquake, so environmental seismology is proposed as an added layer of warning.
• In worst case models a flood set off by an avalanche in Tibet reaches the Nepal border in about 30 minutes, so warning has to be matched by land use zoning and local capacity.
• Evacuation on the first signs of slope instability held deaths in the 2025 Blatten avalanche in Switzerland to one, against over 200 in the 2021 Chamoli ice and rock avalanche.

Panchayats, the tier the plans skip

• The 73rd Constitutional Amendment inserted Part IX, and Article 243G lets a State devolve planning for economic development and social justice to its panchayats.
• The Eleventh Schedule subjects are adaptation subjects: agriculture, minor irrigation, watershed development, social forestry and drinking water.
• The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996, carries panchayat law into Scheduled Areas, where the Gram Sabha protects community resources and approves local plans.
• Climate priorities would enter this system through the Gram Panchayat Development Plan.

What a village plan can carry, and what stops it