- Sunday, April 28, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
BRITISH prime minister Boris Johnson on Monday (1) lauded the climate commitments announced by his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and that half of India’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2030.
Modi revealed India’s goal to achieve the net-zero target of balancing its energy consumption by 2070 in his speech on Monday at the World Leaders’ Summit (WLS) in Glasgow where the COP26 climate summit is underway.
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The Indian prime minister laid out ‘Panchamrit’ or five key points of heading towards the ambitious target, including increasing India’s non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030 and reducing its total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes.
“India has today announced ambitious plans for half its energy to come from renewables by 2030. This will cut carbon emissions by a billion tonnes, contributing to a worldwide decade of delivery on climate change,” Johnson said on Twitter after Modi’s speech.
India will achieve net-zero target by 2070: Modi
“PM Narendra Modi has for the first time made a commitment for India to become net zero, meaning 90 per cent of the world’s economy is now committed to this goal. The UK will work with India to make even more progress, including through the Clean Green Initiative we discussed today COP26,” he said.
The new UK-India Green Guarantee is set to add £750 million for green projects across India, Johnson said at the summit.
Indian foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said in a media interaction at the end of the first day of the WLS, “While many of the economies that have announced a net zero have peaked much earlier, we are yet to peak; we are yet to reach that level of industrial activity in development… if you see the time lag between peaking and the timeline between net zero for many countries, clearly ours is possibly among the shortest.”
“We are essentially a developing country. Our focus is on bringing millions of our citizens out of poverty… We constitute 17 per cent of the world’s population. Yet, we contribute only 5 per cent to global emissions and yet we are contributing very readily through the entire overall issue of climate change because we believe in it,” he added.
