COP26 Summit: Experts laud India's target to go Net Zero by 2070 but remain unsure on how it will be met

PM Modi addressing UN climate change conference 2021 in the UK (Image: Twitter/@narendramodi)

Climate experts across the board have come out in support of India’s latest decision to cut carbon emissions to a balanced net zero level by 2070. But many have raised questions of how this mammoth target will be met given India’s economic levels and whether the plan may prove to be a bit too ambitious.

On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to the stage at the COP26 Summit in Glasgow to make the historic announcement. He promised the global community that India will achieve the target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2070.

“I think it is more than India’s fair contribution to global efforts to stay within 1.5 degrees Celsius,” said Subrata Chakrabarty, senior manager, climate programme at World Resources Institute India.

To achieve the overall target, Modi said the government will be implementing a series of steps. This includes increasing non-fossil fuel electricity capacity to 500 gigawatts, sourcing 50 percent of India's total energy requirements from renewables and reducing 1 billion tonnes of emissions from the present till 2030.

“The interim targets till 2030 looks ambitious and 2070 net-zero targets can build on these,” Chakrabarty said. While the government is yet to sketch out the finer details of how each of these targets would be met, Chakrabarty said the interim targets till 2030 look very ambitious.

Consensus on ambition 

Most experts have termed the targets as generous and ambitious for India. “This is a bold announcement, if you look at the 2030 targets that India has set. It means that coal power and emissions from coal-based thermal power plants will peak before 2030. So the entire electricity sector will be predominantly renewable in 2030,” said Chandra Bhushan, CEO of the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology.

The other outcome is that the energy industry will be largely renewable as well as based on storage, he said. As industry becomes more dependent on storage, a large number of jobs should emerge along skilling and reskilling requirements in renewable, storage technology and hydrogen energy.

However, Bhushan warned that if India wants to become net zero in only carbon dioxide by 2070, it will be compliant to a 2-degree rise in global temperature. If it wants to become net zero in all greenhouse gases, it will remain compliant to 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature rise. “We have to see what India has committed,” he said.

Pressure to announce

Other experts said they have been taken aback by India's announcement. “I think there must have been tremendous pressure globally for us to be able to indicate a year by when we would go net zero. The pressure had started even before the Glasgow summit began for all countries to commit to a net zero target by 2050. The announcement was a surprise for many,” said Suruchi Bhadwal, director, earth science and climate change at The Energy and Resources Institute.

“This was the expectation of both the developed and developing world, and large nations like India and China were definitely looked upon as countries that should be making the commitment. India is the third largest emitter in the world right now,” she said. Before the summit, China had declared the country will be going net zero by 2060.

Now that the decision has been made, there needs to be back-end calculations, research and estimations to see what kind of commitment India has made and whether it is feasible to achieve that target or not, she added.

She said the timeframe may prove to be tight despite it looking obviously long. “Fifty years may look like 50 years. But if you look at the example of developed countries, they haven't been able to do it for the last many years, or other commitments they took on earlier as well. In my opinion, it is going to be very challenging even in 2070 to achieve this goal. It would require huge changes in the entire system and we will have to see how fluidly people will be able to move from one system to another,” she stressed.

However, others are more optimistic. “Net zero carbon emission by 2070 is a long-shot goal. But I think India is well poised to achieve actual net zero much before that. If you see our commitments in other aspects, the pathway is all formed. Only we have to see how quickly we can integrate the storage with our renewable energy pathways so that the reliability factor can be enhanced,” Samrat Sengupta, programme director, climate change and renewable energy at the Centre for Science and Environment, said.

To begin with, the decision to reduce emissions by 1 billion tonnes from now to 2030 would prove to be the most important first step, he added. According to CSE analysis, India’s emissions in 2021 came to 2.88 gigatonnes and in a business-as-usual scenario, are slated to reach 4.48 gigatonnes. This is now pegged to come down to 3.48 gigatonnes.

“If we achieve this, we get 2.31 tonnes per capita of emissions, which is very aggressive compared to other major emitters such as the US (9.42 tonnes), Europe (4.12 tonnes) and China (8.88 tonnes),” said Sengupta.

Help from richer nations in the form of climate finance will be key for this, he underlined. This was seconded by Bhushan who said the kind of money that is required to invest in new infrastructure cannot be raised tapping domestic resources.