On 1 February, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman unveiled the government’s budget for 2026, which included a new $2.2bn funding push for carbon capture technologies.
In the absence of its new international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement, the budget offers a glimpse into the key climate and energy security priorities of the world’s third-largest emitter, amid increasing geopolitical tensions and trade challenges.
While Sitharaman’s budget speech did not mention climate change directly, she said: “Today, we face an external environment in which trade and multilateralism are imperilled and access to resources and supply chains are disrupted.”
Sitharaman emphasised that “new technologies are transforming production systems while sharply increasing demands on water, energy and critical minerals”.
The budget sets out: support for the mining and processing of critical minerals and rare earths; import duty exemptions for nuclear power equipment; and support for renewables, particularly rooftop solar.
However, unlike in some previous years, the 2026 budget does not include specific climate adaptation measures.
Below, Carbon Brief runs through five key climate- and energy-focused announcements from the budget.
- Carbon capture, utilisation and storage
- Critical minerals and rare earth ‘corridors’
- Nuclear energy
- Renewables
- Adaptation
Carbon capture, utilisation and storage
The biggest climate-related budget announcement was $2.2bn to support carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies in India over the next 5 years.
These are technologies that capture carbon dioxide (CO2) as it is released, then use or store it underground or under the sea.
This funding is aimed at decarbonising five of India’s high-emitting industrial sectors – power, steel, cement, refineries and chemicals. These sectors are “staring at the risk” of coming under the EU’s carbon adjustment mechanism (CBAM), even after a recent EU-India trade deal, according to Sitharaman.
The funding is meant to align with a roadmap released last year that sees CCUS as a “core technological pillar” of India’s 2070 net-zero strategy, particularly for “decarbonising sectors where viable alternatives are limited”, notes the government’s roadmap.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth assessment report, however, the need for CCUS to mitigate industrial emissions “may be overestimated”, compared to measures such as energy and material efficiency and electrification.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Dr Vikram Vishal, a professor of earth sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B),, describes the budget move as a “big welcome step for industrial decarbonisation and India’s net-zero ambitions as a whole”.
Vishal says that the funding could go towards getting “big demonstration plants to near-commercial plants” that could entail even bigger investments in the future.
He tells Carbon Brief:
“India is blessed with both onshore and offshore availability for carbon storage. But while utilisation exists, storage has not happened, per se, even at a decent scale. We [would] need to build transportation infrastructure from the point source of capture at scale, on land and offshore. While offshore storage is very low risk, onshore presents a closer proximity to emission sources.”
However, that could also mean closer proximity to densely populated or protected areas.
Vishal adds that India has a very large theoretical storage potential, even a quarter of which would allow for up to 150bn tonnes of CO2 to be stored. This could sustain CCUS for hundreds of years, Vishal says, adding: “And by that time, the energy transition would have happened, right?”
Critical minerals and rare-earth ‘corridors’
Mining, sourcing and processing “critical minerals” and rare earths is another key area of India’s 2026 budget.
It proposes establishing “dedicated rare-earth corridors” in the “mineral-rich” coastal states of Odisha, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to “promote mining, processing, research and manufacturing”. These corridors are intended to complement a $815m rare-earth permanent-magnet scheme announced in November.
In addition, the budget supports “incentivising prospecting and exploration” for rare-earth minerals, such as monazite, as well as others that the government wants to include in its list of “critical minerals”.
Last week, for instance, India classified coking coal – which is predominantly used in making steel – as a “critical and strategic mineral”, removing regulatory measures such as the need to consult affected communities before developing new mines.
Sehr Raheja, programme officer at New Delhi thinktank Centre for Science Environment, tells Carbon Brief that “moving up the critical-minerals value chain” is “increasingly essential” for the energy transition in developing countries.
She adds that some of the measures announced in India’s budget “point in that direction”, explaining:
“Globally, developing countries often stay stuck in the extraction stages of value chains and capture the least value. While duty exemptions for critical mineral processing and battery manufacturing signal intent to build domestic manufacturing capacity, the extent to which these new efforts deliver sustained value will only become apparent over time.”
Rahul Basu, research director at the Goa Foundation, which advocates for “intergenerational equity” in mining, tells Carbon Brief:
“Rare earths are not particularly rare. What is difficult is separating and refining them. China imports ore from around the world, including [the] US. Their competitive advantage lies in processing, including the ability to tolerate high pollution levels.
“India should perfect the processing technology with imported ores first. It is the critical piece. Not mining. We seem to want to mine the same beaches that are already seeing sea-level rise.”
Nuclear energy
The Indian government has also lifted customs duties on imports of nuclear power equipment within the 2026 budget.
Under the changes, equipment for all nuclear power plants will not be subject to customs duties until 2035, irrespective of capacity.
The announcement follows India enacting a landmark new nuclear act, dubbed the “Shanti” act, in December 2025. This seeks to privatise and invite foreign participation in the country’s nuclear energy sector, which has been largely state-run for decades and has a long history of public protests over safety and land-acquisition concerns.
The Shanti act – which is an acronym for “sustainable harnessing and advancement of nuclear energy for transforming India” – aims to help India increase its nuclear capacity tenfold to 100 gigawatts (GW) by 2047.
This coincides with 100 years since India’s independence and is “the year India aims to attain developed-nation status”, according to prime minister Narendra Modi.
Renewables
Support for renewables in India’s budget this year is significant, but “uneven”, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Allocations to India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) grew by 24% to a “record high” in the 2026 budget, with the bulk going to the prime minister’s flagship rooftop solar scheme. The government also cut import duties on lithium-ion cells for battery storage systems, as well as on inputs for solar-panel glass manufacturing.
However, Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, tells Carbon Brief that spending on wind energy and – “more critically” – on transmission and energy storage has either “stagnated or declined” this year.
Garg says grid infrastructure is “fundamental” to renewable expansion. She explains:
“Transmission infrastructure and storage are fundamental to integrating higher shares of renewable energy into the grid. As renewable penetration rises, these elements become not optional but indispensable, and the current level of support falls short of what is required.”
Adaptation
The budget does not announce any specific adaptation measures or schemes, although it does mention a plan to develop and rejuvenate reservoirs and water bodies and to “strengthen” fisheries value chains in coastal areas.
The budget does not mention or include measures related to heat stress or its impact on productivity and workers in sectors such as agriculture.
According to India’s national economic survey tabled ahead of the budget, adaptation and “resilience-related” domestic spending “surged” from 3.7% of the country’s GDP in 2016-17 to 5.6% in 2022-23.
Yet, unlike earlier budgets, allocations to and expenditure from India’s National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change are not separately visible in the 2026 document.
Harjeet Singh, climate adaptation expert and founding director at the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, tells Carbon Brief that this budget was a “missed opportunity” and a response “not commensurate to the needs [for adaptation] on [the] ground or investment at the scale of crisis that we are facing”.
Singh adds that it fails to recognise the “huge” economic impacts already being felt in India. He says:
“If a budget doesn’t recognise how climate change is already eroding India’s development – causing huge economic losses – and is going to affect our GDP growth, it means that you aren’t really acting, or nudging states to do more.
“It was a missed opportunity to tell the world that we do see adaptation as a problem and we are acting on it, but we also need international cooperation.”
The post Five key climate and energy announcements in India’s budget for 2026 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Five key climate and energy announcements in India’s budget for 2026
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
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