This article is written by Amandeep Kaur, a student of Symbiosis Law School, Pune. The author in this article has discussed in brief the Paris Agreement of Climate Change and its initiatives to reduce Green House Gas emissions.     

Introduction

As due to the Industrialization and Urban Development the climate of the earth has started taking worse turns. Many of the glaciers have started melting, no rainfall in some areas has led to droughts whereas over raining in other areas has caused flooding of that particular region and reduced snowfall has decreased the time period of winters in various parts of the world. To handle this situation the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement along with 196 Parties on 12 December 2015.

Sustainable Development and Environmental Change

There is a two-fold connection between sustainable development and environmental change. One is that environmental change impacts key normal and human living conditions and in this manner likewise also effects the basis for social and economic development, while then again, society’s needs on sustainable development impacts the GreenHouse Gases (GHG) discharges that are causing both environmental change and impotency.

Policies for Climate Change control can be more compelling when reliably implanted with broader strategies which are designed to make the national and regional development plans more sustainable. This happens in light of the fact that the effect of climate inconstancy and change, climate policy responses and related socio-economic development projects will influence the capacity of different nations to achieve goals of sustainable development. On the other hand, the pursuit of those objectives will thus influence the opportunities for, and achievement of, climate policies.

Environmental change impacts on advancement prospects have additionally been depicted in a project on poverty and climate change as Climate Change will constitute existing poverty. Its unfriendly effects will be most striking in the developing countries on account of their reliance on natural resources, and their restricted ability to adjust to a changing climate.

What is Paris Agreement?

This was the collective effort made by international coordination to slow down Climate Change. This Agreement faced great international pressure to avoid repeated failures as it happened in the Copenhagen Conference of 2009. The Agreement is also a representative of the culmination of six years of international climate change negotiations under the UNFCCC. The main aim of this Agreement is to keep the global warming below 2 degree Celsius on a pre-industrial average. It was held that to achieve the goal established under the Paris Agreement all the signed parties need to formulate various changes in their economies and therefore all the signed countries have to set their own climate targets.

Purpose of the Agreement

The main goal of the Agreement is to keep the global temperatures below 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to make efforts to keep the limit of increase in temperature to 1.5 degree Celsius only. This was the additional goal to the one agreed in Copenhagen and confirmed in Cancun. The Agreement did not lead to the specification of the date at which global emissions have to peak as the signed parties were not able to decide a specific date. But the Agreement states that such a peak must be reached as soon as possible and that rapid emission reduction must follow so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.

In accordance with the Agreement, there are two types of action which are essential to meet the main goal of this Agreement i.e. to meet the 1.5 degree Celsius.

• Firstly, the world has to make efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, not to zero as it is near to impossible but to the level where a balance can be maintained between the emissions and the carbon sequestration.
• Secondly, the signed countries have to limit the options to sequester greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris Agreement also defines a sustainable development goal that allows private and public sectors to support such projects which generate transferrable GHG emissions

Paris Climate deal with India

India, the fourth- largest carbon emitter in the world having population of approximately 1.3 billion people also took a step towards reducing the climate by ratifying the Paris Climate Agreement on 2 October, 2016 on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary to become the 62nd nation to join the deal as was announced by the current PM Narendra Modi while addressing the BJP’s national executive meet in Kozhikode, Kerala. The Paris Agreement, formally known as the Conference of Parties (COP) protocol on limiting the climate change, is the world’s first agreement introduced by the UNFCCC among all of its previous agreements.

The centrality of New Delhi’s help to climate change lies in the way that India represents more than 4% of worldwide emissions and is significant for intersecting the limit of 55%. The world’s main two polluters—the US and China — they together account for 40% of worldwide carbon discharges, have effectively approved the agreement.

Commitments by India

India has attempted to adjust its carbon emissions with its economic development objectives by not setting any goal for reducing pollution. In any case, being a part of the worldwide climate change administration, India will have noteworthy commitments to meet under the treaty. The nation should decrease its carbon emissions by 33-35% from its 2005 levels. This must be accomplished by 2030.

A key outcome for India will come as the reduction of emission intensity targets, which essentially is the volume of emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). The nation should differentiate its energy age sources and move them essentially towards sustainable power sources to lesser volumes of emissions per unit of GDP. In numbers, by 2025, India will require a 175 gigawatt- power production capacity limit from non-petroleum product sources.

However, another commitment under the treaty expects India to build its woods cover by five million hectares alongside a change in the nature of the green front of an equivalent measure. It is expected that the expanded backwoods scope will enable India to absorb massive carbon emissions from the climate.

Analysis

The change in climate is now affecting all the countries in almost each and every continent. It is also obstructing national economies and affecting the lives of people with sudden and random changes and countries dearly today and even more tomorrow. Individuals are encountering the noteworthy effects of climate change, which incorporate changing climate patterns and rising ocean level. The ozone-harming substance emissions from human exercises are driving climate changes and are rising on a daily basis. They are presently at their largest amounts ever. Without activity, the world’s normal surface temperature is estimated to rise over the 21st century and is probably going to outperform 3 degrees Celsius this century—with a few zones of the world expected that would warm considerably more. The poorest and most powerless individuals are being influenced the most.

In the 21st century, people adopted the Paris Agreement at the COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015 to sort out the issue of climate change. This Agreement came into effect on 4 November 2016. All the countries decided to pursue efforts to combat the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius. To achieve the goals of Sustainable Development the implementation of the Paris Agreement in all the countries is necessary. Along with this, it also provides a rough plan for the methods for climate change which will reduce emissions.

India is among the bunch of significant polluters that is on track to accomplish the national targets set to address climate change under the Paris Agreement. After this Agreement almost all the firms despite being business firms and industrial enterprises have started taking various measures such as companies in the BSE top 200 are setting goals to decrease the number of activities and operations which led to the production of carbon dioxide. They have also started increasing the use of renewable energy to achieve the goal of sustainable development and have made changes in their units to consume less energy and to provide more efficient output.

In any case, it isn’t only top stock-market performers that are reacting to climate dangers. Industrial units in energy-intensive areas, for example, aluminium, concrete and materials have decreased the measure of carbon dioxide they produce, bringing about a 1.93% reduction in India’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is not only the big names like Infosys, Mahindra, Tata Consultancy Services, Dr Reddy’s and Essar Oil that are taking initiatives but nearly 500 firms of different sectors have already reduced the carbon dioxide emissions by 31 million tons over past few years from 2012 to 2015. By being an early contestant into the arrangement and assuming a key part in the approval of the Paris Agreement, India will be in a superior position to put weight on developed nations to make more goal-oriented duties for controlling carbon outflows and giving accounts and innovation to developing nations to encourage a low-carbon economy under the new principles of the Paris Agreement.

US plan to cut its discharges by 26-28% by 2025 against 2005 levels and the EU has promised to bring down it by 40% by 2030 against 1990 levels as a feature of the initial commitments. These objectives are less inspiring than that of India’s. India and China have both gone up against more than what’s coming to them of the burden of decreasing emissions growth under the Paris Agreement. No question arises for logic or equity for these two developing countries to cover the gap a rich nation who is not ready to meet its responsibilities. Paris Agreement requires India and different countries to routinely update their greenhouse emissions inventory.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has more than once said that the nation needs to address climate change, not on account of pressure from Western nations but rather as a result of the potential harm warming could cause worldwide and in India particularly. The idea that developed and developing nations ought to have distinctive duties has been a key standard of climate negotiations since nations initially accumulated in a large scale meeting to address an unnatural weather change in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Withdrawal of US from the Paris Agreement

Even before being the President of US Donald Trump claimed the withdrawal of US from the Paris Climate Change Agreement as according to him climate change is a practical joke. After taking over as the US President he totally demolished all the climate-related policies as made by former US President Barack Obama. Trump has also cancelled the Clean Power Plan as framed by Obama and has made a new proposal of Affordable Clean Energy Rule which unlike the former plan has no target for reducing national emissions and provides states with the authority to decide on their own on how much to cut emissions from power plants. The withdrawal of the most powerful nation and the highest Green House Gas emitter of the world is going to affect climate change governance. Following are the changes which are likely to be observed:

• This withdrawal has converted the US from a supplier to a consumer which will affect the supply of global public goods.
• It has automatically lead to a huge amount of cut in the Multiple Environmental Fund which will affect the policies initiated under the Paris Agreement.

Indian begins working

The central government has appointed three research organizations to extend a long term low carbon growth direction for India. This is the initial step India has taken locally to accomplish its responsibilities under the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The Energy Research Institute, Observer Research Foundation and Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy are entrusted with suggesting three distinctive future low carbon growth situations for the nation. The three institutions are required to come up with their discoveries in about a year, a long time before the execution of the Paris Agreement in 2020. Their investigations will extend economic development and accompanying greenhouse gas emissions for the period 2030-45. The expectation is that with expanded straightforwardness and an ambitious general target, nations will advance forward with goal-oriented national designs.

Conclusion

India needs to work more on green economics and sustainability. It ought to accept objectives well beyond the Paris pledges and show others how it is done where an extensive comprehension of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan turns into a mantra for the country. We should likewise connect with the genuine strains that climate action needs to go up against. Leadership and education are significant for the business pioneers, even those who are connected to non-renewable energy sources must perceive that a more extended term vision of maintainable business rehearses, at last, will harvest higher returns.

Each schoolchild ought to be educated ecological activism, arousing an understanding that little activities (cooking with gaseous petrol instead of lamp oil, for instance) in total to make a difference for climate hygiene. There are likewise cases of ecological bravery. Review Jadav “Molai” Payeng who planted trees one sapling at any given moment in north Assam, transforming a desolate sandbar into a rich 1,360-section of a land woodland biological system.