UPSC Articles
Climate financing
Part of: Prelims and GS III – Climate change
Context India has demanded a trillion dollars over the next decade from developed countries to adapt to, and mitigate, the challenges arising from global warming.
- India has kept this as a condition for delivering on climate commitments made by the Prime Minister recently.
What is Climate financing?
- Climate finance refers to local, national or transnational financing—drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing.
- It seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions that will address climate change.
- Delivering on climate finance is among the stickiest points of contention between developed and developing countries because developed countries, as a group, have failed to provide $100 billion annually by 2020, as promised from a decade ago.
What is India’s aim?
- India’s five-fold plan aims at reducing the carbon intensity of its economy and eventually achieving net zero by 2070.
What does net zero mean?
- Net zero is when a country’s carbon emissions are offset by taking out equivalent carbon from the atmosphere, so that emissions in balance are zero.
- However, achieving net zero by a specific date means specifying a year, also called a peaking year, following which emissions will begin to fall.
India’s conditional NDCs (Nationally Determined Contribution)
- India’s NDCs (Nationally Determined Contribution) are conditional, that is, subjected to the availability of $1 trillion amount in climate finance.
- NDCs are voluntary targets that countries set for themselves, which describe the quantum and kind of emission cuts they will undertake over a fixed period to contribute to preventing runaway global warming.
- India’s last NDC was submitted following the Paris Agreement of 2015.
