Climate Change: Not Vision, Not Plan

The long-awaited National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) is an important landmark in the climate change debate in India. It is not, however, an adequate response to the scale of the challenge.

This cannot have been an easy plan to write. India has faced considerable, and largely unfair, pressure from the industrialised world to take action for a problem substantially created by them. At the same time, India has much to lose from a changing climate, and much to gain for climate and non-climate reasons from enhancing the ecological sustainability of our development path. The plan’s circumspect approach reflects these constraints. The NAPCC starts with an important commitment to re-direct growth objectives toward ecological sustainability, but provides a mixed bag of measures through which to do so. As a result, the NAPCC document is neither fully vision nor plan. And it fails to grapple squarely with the international deadlock in the climate arena, without which India’s future security cannot be assured.