Publication Year: 2024

Energy Transitions Preparedness Initiative: Buildings Sector

Executive Summary

  • India’s buildings sector will play a critical role in meeting the country’s climate targets while promoting resilient cities (IEA 2021b). Buildings also represent the demand side of the energy transition, which is otherwise generally dominated by discourses on the supply side. The sector is undergoing clean energy transition while also contributing to it. Urgent political attention and coordinated action between national and sub-national actors across the buildings value chain are needed if energy transition goals must be achieved in a cost-effective and timely manner.

  • The Energy Transition Preparedness Initiative (ETPI) provides a framework to study and understand state-level plans, actions, and governance processes towards energy transition. The framework covers multiple themes in 24 indicators, representing crucial aspects of energy transition in the electricity, buildings, and transport sectors. The buildings sector covers many themes across five indicators.

  • Buildings are a state subject and therefore energy transition actions in the sector must be studied at the state level. Evidence suggests that buildings are contributing to national and state-level energy transition goals in many ways. There are examples of effective and ambitious policy initiatives with varying scales of action to facilitate transition. Despite the progress, greater efforts are required to implement stated policies in order to achieve the sector’s transition objectives.

  • This study aims to understand the energy transition preparedness of the buildings sector of 10 states in India and highlights good examples from the states. Drawing on information available in the public domain, it sheds light on the level of energy transition preparedness in these states for FY 2020-21.

  • This report studies energy transition preparedness across multiple states, facilitates cross learning between them, and promotes adoption of approaches suitable to their specific contexts.

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Synergistic Impact of Air Pollution and Heat on Health and Economy in India

Abstract

In recent years, developing countries have been grappling with two significant environmental challenges—air pollution and increasing temperature. The impact of these issues on health and the economy has been extensively studied, leading to a growing body of literature highlighting their individual consequences. Understanding the synergistic effect of air pollution and increasing temperature on human well-being is a new topic of research that has received little attention in developing nations.

This chapter, published in the book The Climate-Health-Sustainability Nexus: Understanding the Interconnected Impact on Populations and the Environment (Springer), aims to address this gap in knowledge by thoroughly examining the existing literature to understand the combined influence of these environmental stressors and their implications for global health and the economy. We look into the trends of global exposure to air pollution and temperature and explore the pathophysiological pathways through which air pollution and increasing temperature affect human health. Our findings point to a severe lack of evidence on the synergistic impact of the two on human health in India. In the face of increasing climate vulnerability, the Indian economy is exposed to large degrees of risk through direct and indirect costs. It is crucial that the interplay between air pollution and heat be studied in depth. By dissecting these pathways, policymakers and healthcare professionals can develop more targeted strategies to mitigate the combined impacts of both on public health.

Finally, we focus on the health and economic co- benefits of implementing interventions to reduce air pollution and combat heat waves. By addressing these challenges in tandem, there is an opportunity to achieve greater overall benefits for both human well-being and economic prosperity. Through a deeper understanding of these interconnected challenges, we can strive for a healthier and more sustainable future for all, especially for those most vulnerable to poor environmental quality.

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Sustainable Solutions to Crop Residue Burning and Air Pollution Cycle in India and Pakistan

Introduction

Crop residue burning (CRB), or stubble burning, is common across much of India and Pakistan. Its prevalence is most highly concentrated in the agricultural belts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) that straddles both nations. This region contributes substantially to both nations’ agricultural productivity and food security, primarily through growing staple crops, rice and wheat. While CRB occurs sporadically in different parts of both countries throughout the year, the seasonal burning occurring annually between October and November, coupled with unfavorable meteorological conditions in the IGP, results in extreme air pollution across the whole region. The byproduct of a short transition between growing seasons, the particulate matter (PM2.5) released as a result of CRB in the North-east of Pakistan and North-west of India is carried downwind to other parts of the IGP, with substantial focus afforded to the impact it has on the air quality of India’s National Capital Region due to prevailing low winds and colder temperatures. The PM2.5 levels measured in the region during this period routinely exceed World Health Organization guidelines for acceptable levels of exposure by 20-100 times, causing a public health emergency.

This chapter aims to unpack the scope of CRB across both countries, understand the proximal and distal causes, current policy interventions, and how both countries could sustainably address this issue in the long run.

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SFC Perspectives on Adaptation and Resilience, Climate Policy, Energy Transitions, and Environmental Governance and Policy

Overview

SFC Perspectives are intended to stimulate discussion by providing an overview of key issues and avenues for action to inform India’s sustainable development trajectory.

Read our Perspectives on:

1. Adaptation and Resilience: Building systems that allow India to adapt to climate impacts (by Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Tamanna Dalal)
2. Perspectives on Climate Policy: Embedding a development-centric, climate-ready approach to policymaking (by Aman Srivastava, Easwaran J Narassimhan and Navroz K Dubash)
3. Enabling the Energy Transition: Technology, politics & institutions in India’s energy system (by Ashwini K Swain, Sarada Prasanna Das, Suravee Nayak, Catherine Ayallore and Navroz K Dubash)
4. Perspectives on Environmental Governance and Policy: Systemic transformations to limit the health burden of air pollution (by Bhargav Krishna, Shibani Ghosh, Arunesh Karkun and Annanya Mahajan)

Perspectives on Adaptation and Resilience: Building systems that allow India to adapt to climate impacts

Introduction

Climate projections and the lived reality of weather events drive calls for urgent and concerted attention to climate adaptation. But what does this mean in practice? Indeed, seen through a conservative lens, one could quite convincingly argue that India and several other climate vulnerable countries have a long and storied history of reducing disaster mortalities in some areas. They should – in theory – be able to build sufficient reactive capacity to deal with climate impacts. Both India and Bangladesh have, for example, used policy and awareness building tools to drastically reduce annual deaths due to cyclones. This perspective paper, however, argues that the scale and complexity of the climate challenge merits serious consideration of systemic change, and a re-examination of what is needed for economy and society to thrive in an era of frequent, and often ravaging, climate impacts.

This effort is particularly relevant to India’s present developmental moment. Three decades of sustained growth have established an economy characterised by expanded trade, infrastructural advances, and both greater wealth and inequality. This emergence coincides uneasily with alarming manifestations of a changing climate. India’s deep vulnerability to climate change is likely to worsen
as impacts become more frequent and intense in its teeming cities, along a 6100 km-long coastline, and across a mountain range that supplies water to a third of the world’s population. How does a modern economy simultaneously protect the gains of hardwon growth while climate-proofing the future? And, as the Indian state evolves, how should it shape itself to be appropriately responsive to these new threats?

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Enabling the Energy Transition: Technology, politics & institutions in India’s energy system

Introduction

India must build a 21st century energy system while simultaneously grappling with 20th century problems of energy access, operational inefficiencies, and financial leakages in electricity distribution. Unlike industrialised economies which are in a position to taper their demand, India needs to expand energy use to fuel economic growth and social aspirations. How India chooses to meet its future energy demand – how it produces and consumes energy – is consequential for India’s development future, but also the global energy transition.

India has positioned itself as a frontrunner in the energy transition by setting ambitious near-term targets for clean energy to contribute toward the long-term pledge of net-zero emissions by 2070. Its domestic energy targets include 500 GW non-fossil energy generation capacity, inclusive of 450 GW of renewable energy (RE), and renewable purchase obligations (RPOs) – a de facto generation target – of 43% to be met by 20302. Besides, as part of its G20 presidency, India mobilised a consensus to triple RE capacity and double energy efficiency globally by 2030, subsequently reflected in the Dubai Declaration.

The transition from fossil fuel to RE comes with the potential for energy self-sufficiency, a promise of low-cost power to meet welfare demands, and an opportunity for competitive, job-creating and green industrialisation. However, these opportunities are neither automatic nor free of costs. While an affordable, cleaner, greener, job-creating energy future beckons, the path from here to there will be disruptive, likely creating losers who have an incentive to slow-down changes, potentially risking stability of energy supply, and will depend on far greater finance and infrastructure investments. 

The technology shift that undergirds India’s energy transition will need to be accompanied by foundational institutional changes. Tapping the potential of RE depends on clear and coherent plans, institutional capacities, and governance processes that enable the unwinding of lock-ins to incumbent technologies, and create space for new and emerging technologies. Managing likely disruptions and enabling the transition requires fundamental shifts in politics and institutions in Indian energy along with adoption of new technology.

Our research and engagements at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC) focus on rethinking the configuration of technology, politics and institutions in Indian energy as a necessary complement to techno-economic solutions for enabling the transition. To explain the configuration and suggest priorities for change, we focus on three interlinked areas: the economic viability of electricity distribution, subnational preparedness, and just energy transition.

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Perspectives on Climate Policy: Embedding a development-centric, climate-ready approach to policymaking

Introduction

India is a rapidly growing country pursuing a range of challenging development objectives. Its continued growth and development – particularly in the face of a changing climate – will likely involve large structural shifts in its patterns of growth, urbanisation, and employment. Against the backdrop of this uncertain future pathway, India has also committed to decarbonising its economy over a multi-decadal timescale. To this end, it has instituted multiple targets and policies in relevant sectors, layering in further measures over time in response to evolving conditions. This approach has enabled the country to partially decouple its growth from emissions and grow its renewable electricity generation capacity over the last decade.

Like most countries, India has hitherto taken an opportunity-siezing approach to climate mitigation,green growth, and green industrialisation. But realising greater climate and development benefits requires coalescing these efforts into a strategic approach to low-carbon development that also builds climate resilience. Doing so can present significant opportunities to synergistically achieve these environmental and developmental benefits – navigating shifts in global economic conditions and the ongoing energy transition. Because the strategy-setting, coordination, and consensus building requirements of such a transition are large, such a strategy requires a capable state with a development-centric, climate-ready approach to policymaking. Such a policymaking approach requires 1) modelling capacities to estimate low-carbon pathways and their development implications; 2) institutions capable of coordinating and mainstreaming climate considerations to achieve greater coherence; 3) bureaucracies that work with industry to devise green industrial policy strategies; and 4) the ability to nudge and harness a financing ecosystem to steer investments towards low-carbon development (See Figure 1). A development-centric climate-ready approach to policymaking also requires revisiting the relative roles of the state and markets in steering the country’s low-carbon pathway and addressing problems of the global commons. The identification and appropriateness of these choices for the Indian context merits further study.

The Climate Policy group within SFC approaches policy challenges through a strategic lens, aiming for long-term structural change by shifting discourse, building stronger institutions, and aligning conditions for implementation.

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Perspectives on Environmental Governance and Policy: Systemic transformations to limit the health burden of air pollution

Introduction

Air pollution is the largest risk factor for ill health in India, ahead of high blood pressure, tobacco smoking, and poor diets, contributing to ~1.7 million deaths in 2019. Home to several of the most polluted cities in the world, India has witnessed a doubling of death rates from air pollution between 1990 and 2019. The associated economic burden of this high air pollution was pegged at 1.36% of GDP or ~INR 2 lakh crores in 20191. By any metric, air pollution is a national emergency, and while some important first steps have been taken over the last few years, there is a long way to go before India achieves acceptable air quality levels.

At the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC), we view reducing air pollution not only as a technical challenge, but also as a structural one that requires re-thinking our approach and the institutions that are tasked with addressing it. Systematically addressing air pollution requires a long-term, strategic, goal oriented, health-protecting framework that also integrates short-term implementable technical solutions, all executed by a capable state. Reshaping India’s air pollution policy framework to that end, we believe, will require (1) making health the basis for crafting mitigation priorities, (2) strengthening regulatory institutions in the
ecosystem, (3) executing nested, coordinated, data-driven planning and action from local to airshed levels, and (4) focusing on root causes, not symptoms.

India is at a pivotal moment in its quest to reduce the harms of air pollution and this reshaping of the policy framework is an opportunity to build state capacity and ameliorate health harms while integrating air pollution concerns more deeply into the country’s development goals.

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Impact of heatwaves on all-cause mortality in India: A comprehensive multi-city study

Background

 

Heatwaves are expected to increase with climate change, posing a significant threat to population health. In India, with the world’s largest population, heatwaves occur annually but have not been comprehensively studied. Accordingly, we evaluated the association between heatwaves and all-cause mortality and quantifying the attributable mortality fraction in India.

 

Methods

 

We obtained all-cause mortality counts for ten cities in India (2008–2019) and estimated daily mean temperatures from satellite data. Our main extreme heatwave was defined as two-consecutive days with an intensity above the 97th annual percentile. We estimated city-specific heatwave associations through generalised additive Poisson regression models, and meta-analysed the associations. We reported effects as the percentage change in daily mortality, with 95% confidence intervals (CI), comparing heatwave vs non-heatwave days. We further evaluated heatwaves using different percentiles (95th, 97th, 99th) for one, two, three and five-consecutive days. We also evaluated the influence of heatwave duration, intensity and timing in the summer season on heatwave mortality, and estimated the number of heatwave-related deaths.

 

Findings

 

Among ∼ 3.6 million deaths, we observed that temperatures above 97th percentile for 2-consecutive days was associated with a 14.7 % (95 %CI, 10.3; 19.3) increase in daily mortality. Alternative heatwave definitions with higher percentiles and longer duration resulted in stronger relative risks. Furthermore, we observed stronger associations between heatwaves and mortality with higher heatwave intensity. We estimated that around 1116 deaths annually (95 %CI, 861; 1361) were attributed to heatwaves. Shorter and less intense definitions of heatwaves resulted in a higher estimated burden of heatwave-related deaths.

 

Conclusions

 

We found strong evidence of heatwave impacts on daily mortality. Longer and more intense heatwaves were linked to an increased mortality risk, however, resulted in a lower burden of heatwave-related deaths. Both definitions and the burden associated with each heatwave definition should be incorporated into planning and decision-making processes for policymakers.

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