Publication Type: Journal articles

Litigating Climate Claims in India

Summary

Jacqueline Peel and Jolene Lin’s informative assessment of climate litigation in the Global South is a vital and timely contribution to the growing literature on the issue. It relies on a definition of climate litigation that allows the authors to draw on a much larger set of cases from the Global South by including cases in which climate concerns are “at the periphery.” This essay examines climate litigation in India. Although the term “global warming” started appearing in Indian environmental judgments in the 1990s, climate litigation in India is of relatively recent provenance, and with a few exceptions, climate concerns are peripheral to other, more mainstream environmental issues. Peel and Lin analyze five Indian cases as part of their Global South docket; Ghosh expands this set by including fourteen more cases that she believes fit their article’s chosen definitional ambit. She classifies these cases into four categories based on the use of climate language—reference to climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or the international negotiations—in the courts’ judgment. Drawing from case law analysis and Indian environmental litigation, Ghosh makes observations about what one can interpret from the current set of climate cases, and predicts that while conditions are favorable for climate litigation in India to grow, in the near future climate claims are likely to remain peripheral issues.

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The Disruptive Politics of Renewable Energy

Introduction

The expansion of renewable energy (RE) within India’s electricity system is not a technical question alone. It is also an inherently political struggle between powerful incumbents and disruptive challengers, with destabilising consequences for existing institutional forms and power structures. The existing system is held in place by a supporting configuration of technology, politics and institutions. If RE is to substantially displace fossil fuels, the existing configuration will have to give way to a new such configuration that supports RE. This article explains the existing political and institutional underpinnings of the current electricity system, and discusses the forces that hold them in place and what it will take to shake these loose. In doing so, it seeks to make two points to two discrete audiences. First, to electricity and energy practitioners, it suggests that looking at the spread of RE only through a technical lens is highly incomplete; the likelihood, speed and impact of RE will be determined by political and institutional factors as well. Second, to broader analysts of India’s economy and politics, it suggests that disruptions in Indian energy are highly likely to also imply disruptive politics and economics; any story of Indian political economy in the coming decade is incomplete without an exploration of shifts driven by changes in electricity politics.

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The Price of Power: The political economy of electricity trade and hydropower development in eastern South Asia

Summary

This article frames the political economy of electricity trade and hydropower development in eastern South Asia. It distils and analyzes four crucial variables in this regard: the health of distribution companies in India; the role of hydropower in India’s ambitious turn to renewable energy; Bangladesh’s power crisis and import dependency; and the governance of regional electricity trading arrangements. It argues that progress in both electricity trade and hydropower development in the region will be incremental in the next decade, hindered by mixed demand signals and the turbulence of geopolitics.

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The impact of air pollution on deaths, disease burden, and life expectancy across the states of India: the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Summary

Background

 

Air pollution is a major planetary health risk, with India estimated to have some of the worst levels globally. To inform action at subnational levels in India, we estimated the exposure to air pollution and its impact on deaths, disease burden, and life expectancy in every state of India in 2017.
 

Methods

 

We estimated exposure to air pollution, including ambient particulate matter pollution, defined as the annual average gridded concentration of PM2.5, and household air pollution, defined as percentage of households using solid cooking fuels and the corresponding exposure to PM2.5, across the states of India using accessible data from multiple sources as part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017. The states were categorised into three Socio-demographic Index (SDI) levels as calculated by GBD 2017 on the basis of lag-distributed per-capita income, mean education in people aged 15 years or older, and total fertility rate in people younger than 25 years. We estimated deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) attributable to air pollution exposure, on the basis of exposure–response relationships from the published literature, as assessed in GBD 2017; the proportion of total global air pollution DALYs in India; and what the life expectancy would have been in each state of India if air pollution levels had been less than the minimum level causing health loss.
 

Findings

 

The annual population-weighted mean exposure to ambient particulate matter PM2·5 in India was 89·9 μg/m3 (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 67·0–112·0) in 2017. Most states, and 76·8% of the population of India, were exposed to annual population-weighted mean PM2·5 greater than 40 μg/m3, which is the limit recommended by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards in India. Delhi had the highest annual population-weighted mean PM2·5 in 2017, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Haryana in north India, all with mean values greater than 125 μg/m3. The proportion of population using solid fuels in India was 55·5% (54·8–56·2) in 2017, which exceeded 75% in the low SDI states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha. 1·24 million (1·09–1·39) deaths in India in 2017, which were 12·5% of the total deaths, were attributable to air pollution, including 0·67 million (0·55–0·79) from ambient particulate matter pollution and 0·48 million (0·39–0·58) from household air pollution. Of these deaths attributable to air pollution, 51·4% were in people younger than 70 years. India contributed 18·1% of the global population but had 26·2% of the global air pollution DALYs in 2017. The ambient particulate matter pollution DALY rate was highest in the north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Punjab, and Rajasthan, spread across the three SDI state groups, and the household air pollution DALY rate was highest in the low SDI states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Assam in north and northeast India. We estimated that if the air pollution level in India were less than the minimum causing health loss, the average life expectancy in 2017 would have been higher by 1·7 years (1·6–1·9), with this increase exceeding 2 years in the north Indian states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana.
 

Interpretation

 

India has disproportionately high mortality and disease burden due to air pollution. This burden is generally highest in the low SDI states of north India. Reducing the substantial avoidable deaths and disease burden from this major environmental risk is dependent on rapid deployment of effective multisectoral policies throughout India that are commensurate with the magnitude of air pollution in each state.
 

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More priorities, more problems? Decision-making with multiple energy, development and climate objectives

Summary

The Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement pose new conceptual challenges for energy decision makers by compelling them to consider the implications of their choices for development and climate mitigation objectives. This is a nontrivial exercise as it requires pragmatic consideration of the interconnections between energy systems and their social and environmental contexts and working with a plurality of actors and values. There are an increasing number of indices, frameworks and academic studies that capture these interconnections, yet policy makers have relatively few ex-ante tools to pragmatically aid decision-making. This paper, based on a collation of 167 studies, reviews how multi-criteria decision approaches (MCDA) are used in energy policy decisions to explicitly consider multiple social and environmental objectives, and the conceptual usefulness of doing so. First, MCDA can be used to distil a finite set of objectives from those of a large number of actors. This process is often political and objectives identified are aligned with vested interests or institutional incentives. Second, MCDA can be used to build evidence that is both qualitative and quantitative in nature to capture the implications of energy choices across economic, environmental, social and political metrics. Third, MCDA can be used to explore synergies and trade-offs between energy, social and environmental objectives, and in turn, make explicit the political implications of choices for actors. The studies reviewed in this paper demonstrate that the use of MCDA is so far mainly academic and for problems in the Global North. We argue for a mainstreaming of such a multi-criteria and deliberative approaches for energy policy decisions in developing countries where trade-offs between energy, development and climate mitigation are more contentious while recognizing the data, capacity and transparency requirements of the process.

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India and Climate Change: Evolving Ideas and Increasing Policy Engagement

Summary

India is a significant player in climate policy and politics. It has been vocal in international climate negotiations, but its role in these negotiations has changed over time. In an interactive relationship between domestic policy and international positions, India has increasingly become a testing ground for policies that internalize climate considerations into development. This article critically reviews the arc of climate policy and politics in India over time. It begins by examining changes in knowledge and ideas around climate change in India, particularly in the areas of ethics, climate impacts, India’s energy transition, linkages with sustainability, and sequestration. The next section examines changes in politics, policy, and governance at both international and national scales. The article argues that shifts in ideas and knowledge of impacts, costs, and benefits of climate action and shifts in the global context are reflected and refracted through discourses in India’s domestic and international policies.

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Appellate Authorities under Pollution Control Laws in India: Powers, Problems and Potential

Introduction

Over the last four decades, courts in India have developed a rich jurisprudence on environmental issues. The large body of environmental case-law reflects the judiciary’s predominant approach to environmental grievance redressal – directing regulatory institutions to take action against persistent violations and injustices, expanding the scope of environmental regulation and recommending special environmental adjudicatory mechanisms to make environmental justice more accessible. However, apart from a few judgments there has been less judicial attention, and resultant executive action, to strengthen existing structures and processes for effective redressal against administrative arbitrariness or inaction. This paper focuses on an often overlooked aspect of environmental grievance redressal, viz., the effectiveness of existing redressal forums. Such assessments of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) are already emerging. But, here the authors evaluate the effectiveness of a set of much older environmental redressal forums viz., the Appellate Authorities constituted under the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1974 (the Water Act) and the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981 (Air Act) on two broad dimensions – ability to deliver good quality decisions and accessibility.

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National climate change mitigation legislation, strategy and targets: a global update

Summary

Global climate change governance has changed substantially in the last decade, with a shift in focus from negotiating globally agreed greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets to nationally determined contributions, as enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. This paper analyses trends in adoption of national climate legislation and strategies, GHG targets, and renewable and energy efficiency targets in almost all UNFCCC Parties, focusing on the period from 2007 to 2017. The uniqueness and added value of this paper reside in its broad sweep of countries, the more than decade-long coverage and the use of objective metrics rather than normative judgements. Key results show that national climate legislation and strategies witnessed a strong increase in the first half of the assessed decade, likely due to the political lead up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, but have somewhat stagnated in recent years, currently covering 70% of global GHG emissions (almost 50% of countries). In comparison, the coverage of GHG targets increased considerably in the run up to adoption of the Paris Agreement and 89% of global GHG emissions are currently covered by such targets. Renewable energy targets saw a steady spread, with 79% of the global GHG emissions covered in 2017 compared to 45% in 2007, with a steep increase in developing countries.

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