Economic Development and Glasgow Climate Action

The Challenges

India has to tackle climate change through actions on mitigation (reduction of impacts of climate change) and adaptation (building our resilience to climate shocks). But, we also need to grow as an economy and meet our development needs. 

While we need to make a technological shift to cleaner energy sources (solar, wind etc.) we also need to ensure we don’t further degrade the environment. True climate action would entail both restoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems as well as a phase-down of coal.

A recent report on forests of India has been criticized on the count that it shows a lot of forest for India, but these areas are not forests and neither are they protected as forest. The Forest Survey of India conducts an estimation of Indian forest every two years, through a combination of satellite imagery and ground-truthing. The survey found that India has a forest cover of over 7.3 lakh square kilometres (about 21 percent of our geographical area), which is a slight increase from the last forest estimation. However, many discrepancies have also come to light. Many areas that are not forest, or not managed as forest, have been included in the forest survey estimation. These include tea estates, coffee estates, even parks in New Delhi. What does this mean? In simple words, it means that this ‘forest’ can be cut down or removed at any time as its express purpose is not towards being a forest. This overestimation of our forests needs to be corrected. It would be most useful if the health of our forests is also assessed. As of now, areas that look ‘green’ are being given more value than needed.

At the same time, forests are also being cut down for various infrastructure projects. The proposed Ken-betwa river interlinking in Madhya Pradesh will cut about 23 lakh trees. The project entails moving water from the Ken river to the Betwa river, but it is not clear how much water Ken has to spare. In effect, this is an engineering project which will go against natural ecosystems. What we need today is to plan development in a way that does not significantly damage ecosystems, and attempts conservation and restoration as stipulated by the Glasgow pact.

For this, we need careful and thoughtful planning. India has been urging developed country Parties to scale up and provide climate finance, technology transfer and capacity-building for adaptation, as agreed at various UNFCCC meetings. At COP26 it also asked for a work program on a new collective quantified goal on finance. However, if the developed countries do not cough up the money anytime soon, India still has to make conservation along with growth a national and individual priority for the sake of its own people. 

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