India On Track to Beat Paris Targets, but Next Round Depends on International Finance

India says it is on track to beat its own targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and scaling back fossil fuel use under the Paris climate agreement. But the next round of improvements will depend on international climate finance.

The country is the world’s third-biggest emitter, after China and the United States, and its 2015 Paris promise calls for it to reduce its emissions intensity by 33 to 35% from 2005 levels by 2030, while boosting non-fossil sources to 40% of its electricity production, Reuters reports. “We will achieve these goals before 2030, or in other words, by 2030, these goals will be overachieved,” said Rameshwar Prasad Gupta, India’s secretary of environment, forests and climate change.

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India had already reduced its carbon intensity 24% between 2005 and 2016, when the Paris deal entered into force, and expects to hit its 40% target for non-fossil generation by 2025, five years later, the news agency adds, in a post republished by Channel News Asia.

But further progress will depend on the world’s richest countries keeping their promise, first adopted at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, to devote US$100 billion per year to international climate finance beginning in 2020. The deadline has passed, the promise has not yet been kept, and finance is expected to be a hot topic at this year’s UN conference, COP 26, convening in Glasgow in less than three months.

“Our position is tied with something concrete—something very concrete—on climate finance,” Gupta said. “Climate finance from developed countries to developing countries is an integral part of the whole framework.”

He added that developed countries have an obligation to hit carbon neutrality sooner than others after using “the carbon space disproportionately” over the years and decades. But India, as a developing country, won’t be setting a net-zero target.