India's climate policy: NDCs, net zero and adaptation

Prelims and Mains

A sink is credited only where it can be demonstrated, so the way India measures its forests decides what it is able to report.

• 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.
• At an FSI workshop the Environment Minister tied the enhanced 2035 sink target to how forests are measured, and asked for new assessment technology.
• The Green India Mission and Nagar Van Yojana are among the schemes through which the Centre supports States in raising cover.

See also: MISHTI · The Green India Mission

Prelims and Mains

Extreme heat is met city by city rather than nationally, which is at once the strength of the instrument and its limit.

• Heat Action Plans are what India actually uses against extreme heat, written city by city and district by district.
• 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.
• They now run across 23 States, 195 districts and 64 cities.
• An advisory on informal workers recommends shaded vending zones, drinking water points, cooling centres and flexible working hours.
• Heat falls hardest on those who work outdoors, which is the burden a plan written city by city has to reach.
• The India Cooling Action Plan sits alongside, pushing energy efficient buildings and refrigerants of low global warming potential in vehicle air conditioning.

See also: Notified natural calamities

Prelims and Mains

India's adaptation planning is written in the National Action Plan on Climate Change of 2008 and the State Action Plans beneath it, and there it stops.

• There is no planning framework below the State, 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.
• 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.
• Bela Gram Panchayat in Maharashtra is India's first net zero panchayat.
• What is asked for is stronger funds, functions, functionaries and data, with clear targets and no parallel bodies alongside the panchayat.