The National Action Plan on Climate Change

In one line

India's climate policy is a set of eight missions, and its organising idea is that every measure must serve a development objective as well as a climate one.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the National Action Plan on Climate Change, released in June 2008 by the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, is India's principal climate policy document. It proceeds on the principle that maintaining a high growth rate is essential to raising living standards and reducing vulnerability to climate impacts, and it identifies measures that promote development objectives while also yielding co-benefits for addressing climate change. It establishes eight National Missions.

The principles

The Plan states that it will be guided by the following principles, and a candidate should be able to give at least three.

Protecting the poor and vulnerable sections of society through an inclusive and sustainable development strategy, sensitive to climate change.

Achieving national growth objectives through a qualitative change in direction that enhances ecological sustainability, leading to further mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Devising efficient and cost-effective strategies for end use demand side management.

Deploying appropriate technologies for both adaptation and mitigation, extensively and at an accelerated pace.

Engineering new and innovative forms of market, regulatory and voluntary mechanisms to promote sustainable development.

Notice the first two. Growth is not questioned; it is treated as necessary, and the change asked for is in its direction rather than in its rate. That is the Indian position at Stockholm and at Rio, applied to climate, and it is why the Plan is built on co-benefits rather than on targets.

The co-benefits approach

The organising idea, and the thing to explain rather than list.

The Plan states that it identifies measures which promote India's development objectives while also yielding co-benefits for addressing climate change effectively. That framing has three consequences.

Every mission has a domestic justification. Solar generation is energy security; energy efficiency is cost; water management is agriculture; the Himalayan mission is the water supply of the northern plains. None of them needs to be justified by climate alone.

It is consistent with India's negotiating position. A country arguing that historical responsibility lies elsewhere cannot easily adopt a domestic policy premised on its own primary responsibility, and co-benefits avoids that.

It limits what the Plan can require. A measure that has no development co-benefit has no place in the framework, which is why the Plan contains no emission reduction target and no carbon price.

The eight missions

1. National Solar Mission. Large-scale deployment of solar generation, both grid connected and decentralised, with the object of making solar competitive with fossil generation.
2. National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency. Efficiency in energy-intensive industry, delivered through a market based mechanism for trading efficiency improvements, together with fiscal instruments and financing mechanisms.
3. National Mission on Sustainable Habitat. Energy efficiency in buildings, management of municipal solid waste, and a shift to public transport, together with the resilience of infrastructure to extreme events.
4. National Water Mission. Conservation of water, minimising waste and ensuring more equitable distribution, with an efficiency objective across uses.
5. National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem. Conservation of the glaciers, the mountain ecosystem, biodiversity and the communities of the Himalaya, which is where the water of the northern rivers originates.
6. National Mission for a Green India. Afforestation and the enhancement of forest cover and of ecosystem services, connecting climate policy to the forest policy of module II.
7. National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture. Making agriculture resilient to climate change, through crop varieties, water use efficiency, soil health and insurance.
8. National Mission on Strategic Knowledge for Climate Change. Research, modelling, observation networks and the building of scientific capacity, so that Indian policy rests on Indian data.