Climate financing

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.