Publication Type: Journal articles

Towards Methodologies for Multiple Objective-Based Energy and Climate Policy

Introduction

Planning for India’s energy future requires addressing multiple and simultaneous economic, social and environmental challenges. While there has been conceptual progress towards harnessing their synergies, there are limited methodologies available for operationalising a multiple objective framework for development and climate policy. This paper proposes a “multi-criteria decision analysis” approach to this problem, using illustrative examples from the cooking and buildings sectors. An MCDA approach enables policy processes that are analytically rigorous, participative and transparent, which are required to address India’s complex energy and climate challenges.

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Neither Brake Nor Accelerator: Assessing India’s Climate Contribution

Summary

What does India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution imply for its approach to climate negotiations? And what implications does it have for domestic development choices? This article examines India’s INDC through each lens, to understand the implied logic with regard to India’s complex climate-development choices, and with regard to its strategic international choices. It finds that the INDC reflects, as yet, an inadequate consideration of the climate and development linkages that should inform India’s actions. The contribution reflects a strategic choice to be “middle of the road,” which neither disrupts the fragile diplomatic consensus nor creates pressure for more urgent global action.

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Integrating Global Climate Change Mitigation Goals with Other Sustainability Objectives: A Synthesis

Introduction

Achieving a truly sustainable energy transition requires progress across multiple dimensions beyond climate change mitigation goals. This article reviews and synthesizes results from disparate strands of literature on the coeffects of mitigation to inform climate policy choices at different governance levels. The literature documents many potential cobenefits of mitigation for nonclimate objectives, such as human health and energy security, but little is known about their overall welfare implications. Integrated model studies highlight that climate policies as part of well-designed policy packages reduce the overall cost of achieving multiple sustainability objectives. The incommensurability and uncertainties around the quantification of coeffects become, however, increasingly pervasive the more the perspective shifts from sectoral and local to economy wide and global, the more objectives are analyzed, and the more the results are expressed in economic rather than nonmonetary terms. Different strings of evidence highlight the role and importance of energy demand reductions for realizing synergies across multiple sustainability objectives.

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Reforming the liability regime for air pollution in India

Abstract

The recent uproar about the toxic levels of pollution in the country’s national capital region has once again brought to fore the failure of the regulatory and legal mechanisms in India to control air pollution. According to a World Health Organisation study released in 2014, 13 of the top 20 cities world-wide with the worst quality of air are Indian cities. For decades now the worsening quality of air across the country has been a cause for serious concern; yet the Central and State governments have not been able to contain it. In fact in many ways, governments have not only condoned instances of aggravated pollution, but have also actively permitted pollution to rapidly increase by granting approvals to polluting industries, not taking measures to effectively control vehicular and industrial pollution, and by practically ignoring significant sources of pollution like building construction and diesel generators.
 

Legislative acknowledgement of the problem of air pollution, and the need to tackle it, came more than three decades ago when the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981 [‘the Air Act’] was passed by the Parliament. But this early acknowledgment of the problem, and regulatory mechanisms set up consequently, have not been able to restrict the sharp upward trajectory of air provisions – encapsulating both criminal liability under the Air Act, the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure as well as civil liability under the National Green Tribunal Act 2010 and the Code of Civil Procedure. It does not, however, discuss the rights-based jurisprudence that has evolved from judgments of the Supreme Court and the High Courts (arising primarily under their writ jurisdiction) recognising a right to pollution free air. A writ remedy is a constitutional remedy and available notwithstanding statutory limitations. It is however a discretionary remedy, and courts are generally reluctant to entertain cases if alternative efficacious remedies are available under other statutory provisions.
 
The essay is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the relevant provisions of the law pertaining to liability for causing air pollution. The second part identifies three critical issues that have emerged in the current liability regime. The third and final part proposes a way forward.

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Building Productive Links between the UNFCCC and the Broader Global Climate Governance Landscape

Introduction

Global Environmental Politics examines the relationships between global political forces and environmental change, with particular attention given to the implications of local-global interactions for environmental management as well as the implications of environmental change and environmental governance for world politics. Each issue is divided into full-length research articles and shorter forum articles focusing on issues such as the role of states, multilateral institutions and agreements, trade, international finance, corporations, science and technology, and grassroots movements. Contributions to the journal come from across the disciplines, including political science, international relations, sociology, history, human geography, public policy, science and technology studies, environmental ethics, law, economics, and environmental science.

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Who determines transformational change in development and climate finance?

Summary

The language of transformational change is increasingly applied to climate policy, and particularly in climate finance. Transformational change in this context is used with respect to low-carbon development futures, with the emphasis on mitigation and GHG metrics. But, for many developing countries, climate policy is embedded in a larger context of sustainable development objectives, defined through a national process. Viewed thus, there is a potential tension between mitigation-focused transformation and nationally driven sustainable development. We explore this tension in the context of operationalizing the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has to deal with the fundamental tension between country ownership and transformational change. In relation to climate finance, acceptance of diverse interpretations of transformation are essential conditions for avoiding risk of transformational change becoming a conditionality on development. We further draw lessons from climate governance and the development aid literature. The article examines how in the case of both the Clean Development Mechanism and Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, there has been limited success in achieving both development objectives and ‘nationally appropriate’ mitigation. The development aid literature points to process-based approaches as a possible alternative, but there are limitations to this approach.

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From Margins to Mainstream? State Climate Change Planning in India

Introduction

In 2009, the Government of India requested states to develop State Action Plans on Climate Change. Based on a detailed analysis of five state climate plans, this article finds that climate plans provide an important institutional platform to mainstream concerns of environmental sustainability into development planning but fail to update ideas of sustainability to include climate resilience. There are shortcomings in approach, process, formulation of outcomes, and implementation efforts. These shortcomings are united by a common thread – a tendency to prematurely view state climate plans as vehicles for generating implementable actions rather than an opportunity to redirect development towards climate resilience. However, if state plans are viewed as the beginning of a complex process of updating sustainable development planning rather than as an end in themselves, they provide a foundation upon which climate concerns can be more effectively mainstreamed in local development planning.

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Measuring the Co-benefits of Climate Change Mitigation

Summary

Co-benefits rarely enter quantitative decision-support frameworks, often because the methodologies for their integration are lacking or not known. This review fills in this gap by providing comprehensive methodological guidance on the quantification of co-impacts and their integration into climate-related decision making based on the literature. The article first clarifies the confusion in the literature about related terms and makes a proposal for a more consistent terminological framework, then emphasizes the importance of working in a multiple-objective–multiple-impact framework. It creates a taxonomy of co-impacts and uses this to propose a methodological framework for the identification of the key co-impacts to be assessed for a given climate policy and to avoid double counting. It reviews the different methods available to quantify and monetize different co-impacts and introduces three methodological frameworks that can be used to integrate these results into decision making. On the basis of an initial assessment of selected studies, it also demonstrates that the incorporation of co-impacts can significantly change the outcome of economic assessments. Finally, the review calls for major new research and innovation toward simplified evaluation methods and streamlined tools for more widely applicable appraisals of co-impacts for decision making.

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Is There a Trade-Off between Agricultural Development, Adaptation and Mitigation?

Introduction

India’s long-standing official position in global climate negotiations has been that any discussion on agriculture must be held in the realm of adaptation, not mitigation. The government considers the sector a clear out-of-bounds sector with respect to emissions reduction as agriculture is a sensitive issue and pursing mitigation may produce negative impacts on peoples’ livelihoods. Is this apprehension sound? Is there any trade-off between agricultural development, adaptation and mitigation?

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