Hundreds of millions of Indians will head to the polls from 19 April to 1 June amid scorching heat to cast their votes in the world’s biggest elections.
Their decisions could have significant consequences for how – or even if – India meets its climate goals and adapts rapidly to now almost daily extreme weather impacts.
Over the past decade, the Narendra Modi-led Indian government has been projected and perceived as a climate leader internationally: from his COP26 speech in Glasgow committing India to net-zero by 2070 through to his G20 presidency last year where he announced a renewable “tripling” target which was then echoed in the first “global stocktake” at COP28.
However, despite increasing renewable capacity, the Indian government’s rapid coal expansion and Modi’s links to fossil fuel interests have been dubbed problematic by many and “pragmatic” by others.
His party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – holds a majority in the lower house of parliament and is the single largest party in the upper house, allowing it to pass controversial environmental and forest laws, with limited scrutiny and discussion.
While the BJP dominates – and expects to win the election – India still has more than 2,700 registered political parties and 56 state parties, of which six are officially recognised as national political parties.
Of these, the biggest and oldest is the Rahul Gandhi-led Indian National Congress (Congress), credited with giving India most of its progressive environmental laws and positions on climate, but also accused of ignoring them before its fall from national power in 2014.
In this interactive grid below, Carbon Brief tracks the commitments made by India’s major national political parties in their latest election manifestos across a range of issues connected to climate change.
The grid also includes proposals by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Parties yet to publish their manifestos include the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Delhi’s recently jailed chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) representing India’s historically marginalised castes and minorities, and the National Peoples’ Party representing India’s biodiverse northeastern states. (The grid will be updated when these remaining parties publish their manifestos.)
Each entry in the grid represents a direct quote from one of these documents.
(Note that the BJP refers to India as “Bharat” in most of its manifesto. This is seen by some as a reaction to 26 opposition parties banding together last year to brand themselves the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) alliance.)
Despite an ongoing heatwave, drought, floods, farmer protests and debilitating smog blanketing most Indian cities, many argue that climate and environmental issues are too “peripheral” to sway the billion-strong Indian electorate. Others counter that “all key issues on the ballot in 2024” are linked to climate change.
Historically, however, Indian political parties have regularly rolled out campaigns and subsidies connected to energy, electricity and climate to appeal to Indian voters.
While welfare or development-based promises of free electricity for farmers and cooking gas price cuts are a running election feature, free public transport, land rights and managing natural resources, such as coal or forests, can also mobilise voters.
In 2014, for instance, Modi rode to power on a campaign promise of cleaning up corruption in India’s coal and mining sector, scarred by gargantuan scams.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Aditya Valiathan Pillai from the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, says on one side you have welfare and developmental projects as a “balancing factor” for climate shocks. On the other side, “it’s about gas cylinders, energy access, cheaper electricity…all of that is climate. It’s just that it’s not ‘Extinction Rebellion’-style climate politics”.
Pillai adds:
“I think we see climate politics as the sort of existential, titanic fight for the future of humanity where climate progressives arm wrestle climate deniers. It’s not. There’s a much greater diversity in climate politics. The core difference is the politics of gain and the politics of loss, and we are very much in the politics of gain in India because it’s such a low baseline of development. In the West, it’s the exact opposite.”
Climate and environmental issues may not have been explicitly on top of voters’ or parties’ priorities before, but that has steadily changed since 2019.
While the BJP set out an ambitious renewable energy target of 175 gigawatts (GW) by 2022, AAP campaigned on its air pollution and electric vehicle policies in Delhi.
In 2019, while Congress pledged to bring back protections against deforestation and land-use change, the BSP and its allies promised to deploy clean energy to “destroy caste discrimination”, as “an over-dependence on coal directly impacts tribal populations who are constantly under threat in the name of power-generation”.
This year, climate change is mentioned in all national party manifestos published so far, along with commitments to promote renewable energy and, for the first time ever, critical minerals. For example, the BJP and Congress manifestos both emphasise working towards achieving net-zero by 2070.
The BJP manifesto promises the country “energy independence” by 2047 – a century since India achieved independence from the UK – through “a mix of electric mobility, network of charging stations, renewable energy production and improving energy efficiency”.
The BJP also sets out a 500GW renewable energy target – although it does not specify when this goal would be met. If voted in again, the Modi government says it plans to achieve this through setting up “mega” solar and wind parks and a clean energy corridor, with aims to turn India into a global renewable energy manufacturing hub.
It also emphasises scaling up bioenergy and green hydrogen production, developing small modular nuclear reactors and incentivising private investment in large-scale battery storage.
In the run-up to the elections, Modi has already announced a rooftop solar scheme and promised farmers in the critical election state of Uttar Pradesh to turn India’s sugarcane belt into a biofuel belt.
However, while the BJP’s manifesto pledges to support India’s automobile industry transition to electric vehicle manufacturing, it fails to mention coal even once or to outline how heavy industry will be decarbonised, beyond its existing Green Credit Programme.
While it outlines its commitment to meet India’s still-unclear carbon sink target, the BJP’s manifesto is silent on the forest rights of Indigenous communities, unlike Congress, which promises to set up a national mission to guarantee their rights and to stem deforestation.
In an election where unemployment is set to be a key voting issue, Congress pledged a “Green New Deal Investment Programme” and a “Green Transition Fund” in its manifesto. Congress pledges to generate millions of jobs in renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure and mining critical minerals. Its renewable energy plans lack specific targets, but remain strongly focused on decentralised power and job generation in rural India, with incentives for village councils and farmers to set up solar grids.
Congress is the only national party promising to increase allocations to India’s National Adaptation Fund and wants to create an independent environment authority akin to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Both Congress and CPI have promised to look into landslides caused by floods that caused severe crop losses last year and to reverse “anti-people” amendments to India’s forest and environmental laws made under the Modi government.
The CPI is the only national party to explicitly mention coal in its manifesto, calling for unexplored private coal blocks to be returned to state-run Coal India, to reduce India’s dependence on coal imports and a judicial investigation into “fraudulent” imports by private companies.
Similarly, it is the only party to pledge a participatory “just transition plan” to protect communities and coal workers “affected in the process of transitioning to renewable energy from fossil fuel[s]”.
Its manifesto promises to end private monopolies in renewable energy, seeking to establish the government’s “decisive stake” in the sector “to protect our country’s energy sovereignty”.
To Bangalore-based climate activist Disha Ravi, protests by farmers, youth and citizen groups in the Himalayan region, as well as the visible climate impacts right before election season, have ensured environmental issues have “stayed fresh” in peoples’ minds and made it into manifestos.
However, she is concerned about follow-through, including from state governments where the opposition has been in power. She tells Carbon Brief:
“I live in Karnataka and one of our main environmental demands locally was to get back the right to protest. And they [Congress] haven’t enabled that since they’ve come back to power. They’ve been a little more open to conversations, and it’s great that they have these amazing-sounding policies on paper. But will they actually translate into real life? I don’t know that because they haven’t had a great track record.”
It remains to be seen whether the heat, deforestation or renewable jobs sway Indian voters as they step out to vote over seven phases this summer. But to activists and observers such as Ravi, it is time India has “a national-level climate conversation, and it shouldn’t be just because elections are around the corner”.
The post India election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
India election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate change
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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