India’s new climate pledges under the Paris Agreement of 2015: Real progress or safe targets?

This key difference recognized the diverse development status of countries, their need for economic growth and varied capacity to invest in a climate transition.

At the same time, the pact recognized that a bottom-up approach could result in less-than-adequate climate commitments. It therefore laid down processes for a global stocktake every five years, with the expectation that countries would increase their ambition on climate action as technologies matured and they ascended their own learning curves.

So, how has India’s national status changed and where are we in terms of climate action drivers and opportunities? Around the time that the Paris Agreement was signed, India was the seventh-largest economy in the world. We are now about to become the fourth largest, with a robust GDP growth rate expected even in 2026-27.

While we have surpassed our non-fossil energy capacity commitment, the share of non-fossil energy in our total primary energy supply mix grew from 4.25% in 2014-15 to just 4.85% in 2023-24 (Niti Aayog data). This share may have grown since, but fossil energy remains the vast bulk. In other words, we have not made any real difference towards a transition to clean energy.

A narrow lens on electricity supply reveals that our share of non-fossil installed capacity increased from 30% to 50% over the last 10 years. Its contribution to actual generation increased from 20% to 30%, reflecting the difficulties of making use of renewable power. The increase in non-fossil capacity has gone mostly towards meeting incremental demand growth. Conversely, India’s coal thermal electricity capacity has also increased to fill demand-supply gaps.

In the 10 years since the Paris Agreement, not only has India’s oil demand surged, but the country’s import dependency has also gone up to nearly 90%. Our dependency on imports of liquefied natural gas is more than 50%. The vulnerability became starkly clear after Western sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2022, and now with the US-Israel war on Iran. Paradoxically, India’s coal production and consumption too have increased by nearly 66% and 50%, respectively, in this period.

India’s cabinet recently approved new NDCs under the Paris framework going up to 2035. These include a reduction in the emissions intensity of India’s GDP by 47% from the 2005 base level, 2 percentage points more than the 45% target set earlier for 2030; achieving 60% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel energy sources by 2035, up from 50% by 2030; and creating a carbon sink of 3.5-4.0 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through forest and tree cover by 2035.

Prima facie, this new set of commitments seems to step up our ambitions. But a large part of the reduction in emissions intensity achieved so far has come from the denominator effect—growth in GDP. Our GHG emissions on the whole have only increased with greater fossil energy consumption.

A coarse evaluation would suggest that the government expects a further increase in India’s net emissions—an anticipated 50% increase in GDP between 2030 and 2035 translates to a more than 43% increase in emissions to arrive at a 47% decrease from the 2005 baseline in emissions intensity, given our current scenario.

As far as non-fossil fuel-based electricity generation capacity is concerned, India’s minister of state for new and renewable energy Shripad Yesso Naik had said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha in November 2024 that the percentage of clean sources of energy in our total installed capacity is likely to be 64.4% by 2029-30. If that is indeed the case, a global commitment under the Paris pact of just 60% by 2035 would be alarming.

Apart from a lack of ambition in the context of a looming climate catastrophe that’s almost upon the world, with India being particularly vulnerable, the country’s latest commitments also seem oblivious to the myriad existential challenges that large swathes of the Indian population face.

These range from vulnerabilities arising from high levels of dependence on energy imported from volatile regions of the world, the unbreathable air quality in most if not all urban areas for most of the year and the heat extremes we suffer on account of both concrete-heavy urbanization and already observed climatic changes to the threat of expensive energy coupled with water scarcity.

India’s approach to defining its NDCs continues to be conservative at best. These are modest targets that can confidently be met in a business-as-usual manner, rather than stretch targets that carry a negligible risk of being under-achieved but could provide much-needed global responsibility and leadership.

At a time when governments in some developed countries are stepping back from their earlier commitments under the Paris Agreement, India, as the world’s third largest GHG emitter, could fill the global vacuum and become a stronger magnet for climate investments.

The author is an independent expert on climate change and clean energy.