India’s energy and emissions future: an interpretive analysis of model scenarios

Abstract

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India's energy and emissions future is challenged by the uncertainties of India's development transitions, including its pathway through a demographic and urban transition within a rapidly changing policy context. Model-based scenario analyses provide widely varying projections, in part because they make differing assumptions, often implicit, about these transitions. To address the uncertainty in India's energy and emissions future, this letter applies a novel interpretive approach to existing scenario studies. First, we make explicit the implied development, technology and policy assumptions underlying model-based analysis in order to cluster and interpret results. In a second step, we analyse India's current policy landscape and use that as a benchmark against which to judge scenario assumptions and results. Using this interpretive approach, we conclude that, based on current policies, a doubling of India's CO 2 energy-related emissions from 2012 levels is a likely upper bound for its 2030 emissions and that this trajectory is consistent with meeting India's Paris emissions intensity pledge. Because of its low emissions starting point, even after a doubling, India's 2030 per capita emissions will be below today's global average and absolute emissions will be less than half of China's 2015 emissions from the same sources. The analysis of recent policy trends further suggests a lower than expected electricity demand and a faster than expected transition from coal to renewable electricity. The letter concludes by making an argument for interpretive approaches as a necessary complement to scenario analysis, particularly in rapidly changing development contexts.

Driving Factors of Aerosol Properties Over the Foothills of Central Himalayas Based on 8.5 Years Continuous Measurements

“…As commented in Collaud Coen et al (), trends calculated on time series shorter than 8–10 years usually present larger slopes with great confidence intervals leading to statistically insignificant trends, since the results are too much influenced by the initial and final period together with possible outliers. Interestingly, in contrast to an increase in emission loads in India (Dubash et al, ; Krotkov et al, ; Rao et al, ), a decreasing trend of PM is investigated at MUK, as discussed above, which corresponds to a decrease in the interannual tendency of ABL (using modeled mixing layer depth) air transport to MUK from IGP (supporting information Figure S4). However, in‐depth assessment of its reasons and linkages with aerosol variability could be a future task.…”

“…The role of aerosols over the south Asian region (Di Girolamo et al, ; Lelieveld et al, ) has been a topic of high interest for the past two decades, and it is increasingly recognized as being among the hotspots of aerosols and anthropogenic trace gases; the anthropogenic emissions are relatively high in this region and expected to further increase for the next few decades (Dubash et al, ; IIASA, ; Krotkov et al, ; Ohara et al, ; Rao et al, ). In India, several focused and thematic campaigns such as Indian Middle Atmosphere Programme (Moorthy et al, ), Indian Ocean Experiment (Ramanathan et al, ), Indian Space Research Organization's Geosphere Biosphere Program (ISRO, ), and Integrated Campaign for Aerosols, gases and Radiation Budget (Satheesh et al, ) were conducted in the past.…”

National Climate Policies and Institutions

“…In principle, such a pledge could provide a target to guide future domestic action. However, a compilation and analysis of recent modelling studies suggests that existing domestic policy actions, which have been enhanced in recent years (as shown in Table 19.1), collectively are likely to take India into compliance with this pledge (Dubash et al 2018b). Thus, this pledge is mostly an international statement of intent that signals the likely aggregate effect of current action, rather than a guide to future action.…”

Energy and Climate Change

“…India's dependence on coal will shape the pathways to develop, and also condition how the country transitions quicker to more low-carbon sources. In the near future, India is projected to see an increase in both coal and renewables (Dubash et al 2018). As a result, the NTUI's perspective on India's transition straddles both the coal sector and the renewable energy sector (Mathews, Barria, and Roy 2016: 12).…”