This essay will compare and contrast India and Pakistan’s climate change laws and policies of approximately the last decade regarding three kinds of targets that are attributed high weight in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions: Greenhouse gas emission reduction, emission intensity and efficiency as well as renewable energy (RE).
This focus on mitigation efforts rather than adaptation efforts has been chosen since emerging economies are predicted to be “by far the most important source of future emission growth”. Linked to this, the two states’ main sources of emissions – their electricity and energy sectors – will be discussed throughout the essay. Overall, it is argued that despite similar starting points, India’s emission-related policies have grown more ambitious in recent years, compared to those of Pakistan – but both countries’ efforts still fall short of combatting climate change sufficiently.
Located in one of the world’s regions with the highest climate vulnerability,1 the South Asian giants of India and Pakistan face manifold threats associated with climate change (CC). Many of these - including floods, droughts, more irregular and intense monsoons - are prevalent in both countries. This explains their similar overall vulnerability to some extent (Eckstein et al. 2020),2 though the neighbouring countries are characterised by highly diverse climate zones, even within their own borders. Notwithstanding these and further commonalities, including the two democracies’ deeply intertwined political as well as cultural history, their ambitions and approaches to tackle CC are stunningly different.
More precisely, this essay will compare and contrast India and Pakistan’s CC laws and policies of approximately the last decade regarding three kinds of targets that are attributed high weight in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs): Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction, emission intensity and efficiency as well as renewable energy (RE). This focus on mitigation efforts3 rather than adaptation efforts has been chosen since emerging economies are predicted to be “by far the most important source of future emission growth” (Urpelainen & Van de Graaf 2017, p. 6). Linked to this, the two states’ main sources of emissions - their electricity and energy sectors (International Energy Agency [IEA] 2020a, 2020b) - will be discussed throughout the essay. Overall, it is argued that despite similar starting points, India’s emission-related policies have grown more ambitious in recent years, compared to those of Pakistan - but both countries’ efforts still fall short of combatting CC sufficiently.
India and Pakistan within the global climate governance regime
To date, the INDCs submitted before the Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 in Paris in 2015 represent the only internationally communicated and directly comparable targets of the two countries. This is mostly since both India and Pakistan were excepted from binding climate targets under the Kyoto Protocol (KP; 2005-2020), due to their classification as Non-Annex I- countries under the central coordinator of global climate action, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Under the Paris Agreement (PA) succeeding the KP, both states are called upon to contribute to staying well below a 2°C temperature increase. This, however, does not imply equal efforts between Annex I- and Non-Annex I-countries due to the historically much higher GHG emissions of the former. Instead, the PA “has dismantled the differentiation firewall” (Savaresi 2016, p. 26) by establishing practices of self-differentiation regarding ambition and degree of commitment. Nevertheless, the UNFCCC’s principle of ‘Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities’ (CBDR) remains important and has been amended in Art. 2 of the PA by the qualifier “in the light of different national circumstances.” Consequently, Parties to the UNFCCC have the right to justify their self-set targets with their respective national contexts - which both India and Pakistan do comprehensively.
As can be seen in Table 1, CBDR as a principle has been reinforced by both states in their INDCs, concisely understood by India as “international support in the form of financial grants, technical assistance, technology development and transfer and capacity building.” (Government of India [GoI] 2015, p. 4) By doing so, some of the states’ apparently ambitious targets acquire a conditional nature. A closer and contextualising examination, however, reveals their shortcomings, underlying arithmetic rationales and character as hardly additional to pre-existing targets.
Table 1: The two countries’ INDCs.
Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten
Sources: GoI (2015), Government of Pakistan ([GoP] 2016); compiled by the author.
Emission reduction targets
Firstly, it is revealing that India has not yet specified any direct emission reduction targets (GoI 2015). This can be considered comparatively unambitious, given that they are the only safe measure to prevent a more devastating CC. Certainly, India faces manifold other developmental challenges, as stressed in the INDC - but so does its neighbouring country, though to varying degrees. What is more, both countries share negligibly low historical emissions and equally low per capita emissions compared to major industrialised countries and China (e.g. Ritchie & Roser 2019).
This circumstance, however, distracts from India’s currently much higher share in global emissions compared to Pakistan (6.81% vs. 0.85%; Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment 2020a, 2020b). Arithmetically speaking, reduction targets by the biggest emitters such as India are the more important since they would translate into higher absolute emission reductions in the future. Such self-set obligations might seem more challenging for India than for Pakistan, considering that its population is six to seven times larger (CIA 2020a, 2020b), and that its steadily increasing energy demand is mostly driven by even higher population growth (World Economic Forum 2020). Nevertheless, one can argue that India “may not have a responsibility for climate, but as the third largest annual emitter it may have a responsibility to vulnerable populations to engage climate change.” (Dubash 2019, p. 3; italics in original)
Compared to India, at first glance Pakistan’s target of 20% less GHG emissions in 2030 may seem ambitious. Two aspects about Pakistan’s reduction target remain puzzling: its conditionality as well as the absence of a reference year. Tellingly, the target has been widely contested for its weakness. It is assessed to be reachable without relying on international support (e.g. Lin & Ahmad 2017) and equally represents a drastic setback compared to a former INDC-draft which aimed for 5% unconditional emission reductions by 2030 compared to 2012, or 18% with support (Ebrahim 2015).
This leads to the aspect of reference years. In contrast to many other states, mostly developed but also emerging economies such as India who use 2005 (or more ambitiously 1990), Pakistan does not choose a past reference year to clarify the scope of its ambitions. Instead, by solely referring to 2030, Pakistan grants itself more space to further increase its GHG emissions. This is, on the one hand, because between 1994 and 2015 Pakistan’s emissions grew by 123% (GoP 2016) - choosing a past reference year would have required much higher efforts to reach the appealing same relative number of 20%.
On the other hand, and more importantly, Pakistan projects its emissions to grow by as much as 300 percent in a business-as-usual-scenario, driven by underlying (but unrealistic) exponential GDP growth of seven percent p.a. until 2030 (Ibid.). Explicating Pakistan’s target hidden behind the 20% more clearly, it seeks US$ 40 billion of international grants so that its emissions from 2015 do not quadruple, but ‘only’ reach the 3.2-fold by 2030. Consequently, Pakistan’s target can be considered no more than lip service.
Emission intensity and efficiency targets
Whilst India’s INDC is framed around emission intensity per unit of GDP, Pakistan does not refer to it at all. Considered a key factor for reducing emissions (Lin & Ahmad 2017), Pakistan has repeatedly stressed that its emission intensity is among the world’s lowest (e.g. GoP 2014). Considering that in the last three decades India’s and Pakistan’s levels have converged, it is telling that this conviction finds no expression in its INDC. This is not due to rising emission intensity in Pakistan which has been historically meandering between 0.7 and 0.8kg CO2/2010 USD, but because of a sharp fall in India since the early 1990s, down to Pakistan’s level (IEA 2020a, 2020b). India is hardly a positive outlier: falling emission intensity levels has characterised vast parts of the global economy in the last few decades (Ritchie & Roser 2019).
Crucially, falling emission intensity does not necessarily lead to GHG emission reductions. In contrast, under the 33-35% reduced emission intensity scenario, India’s overall emissions are projected to still increase by as much as 90% by 2030, compared to 2005. Without a point of ‘peak emission’, India’s frequently used argument of not having historical responsibility will therefore be increasingly undermined. Though India’s emission intensity target is widely referred to as the main contributor to its ‘2-degree-compatible’ climate efforts (e.g. Subramanian 2019, Climate Action Tracker [CAT] 2019), its can be argued to be neither overly ambitious - merely quantifying the aggregate effects of current actions - nor new: it updates a similar pledge made before COP 15 in Copenhagen. It can therefore hardly be considered a guide for future actions (Dubash 2019) or as additional. Nevertheless, a further convergence of emission intensity levels - as ultimately sought by India’s unconditional target (GoI 2015) - may increase the pressure on Pakistan to start decreasing its own.
The current trend, however, suggests that Pakistan’s emissions intensity is likely to increase in the future: its domestic natural gas resources - the comparatively least carbon intense fossil fuel - are largely depleted. As a substitute, it increasingly turns towards the more carbon-intense coal, portraying this inevitable and justifying this expansion by repeatedly deploying ‘clean coal’-narratives (e.g. GoP 2014, GoP 2016). While India equally aims to improve the efficiency of most of its coal-fired power plants as part of its ‘Clean Coal Policies’ (GoI 2015), Pakistan vaguely states that “[i]mproving the efficiency of planned coal-based power generation could lead to GHG mitigation.” (GoP 2016, p. 17; italics by the author)
As to whether this may be possible at all is questionable: For Pakistan specifically, Ishaque (2017) finds only limited impact of coal plant efficiency for emission reduction, even under consideration of carbon capture and storage-technologies. It has to be stressed again that even if the efficiency of individual coal-fired power plants may be increased, only absolute emission reductions ultimately matter for the climate. Consequently, the threefold increase of India’s installed coal power capacity since 2000 overshadows potential individual efficiency gains (IEA 2020a) and perpetuates its four-decades long period of continuous emissions growth (Myllyvirta and Dahiya 2020). Tellingly, between 2000 and 2018 India’s emissions growth would have been even larger if it was not for overall energy efficiency increases that helped avoiding an additional 15% of energy demand (IEA 2020a).
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1 Understandable as “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes.” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007).
2 For 1999-2018, India is ranked 17th in the Global Climate Risk Index, Pakistan 5th (Ibid.).
3 Understandable as “the extent to which the statutory provisions of climate policies are likely to restrict GHG emissions if implemented as intended.” (Compston & Bailey 2016, p. 145)
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