Climate change mitigation involves strategies aimed at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting renewable energy sources, improving energy efficiency, and implementing sustainable practices. CSTEP focuses on building models to simulate India's future across sectors, such as transport, industries, buildings, agriculture, and forestry, to find interventions required to achieve a sustainable and secure future. Our work also involves the study of certain themes that cut across sectors (quality of life and development vs climate action, water and land demands for agriculture vs power, etc).
CSTEP's SAFARI model: Balancing development with climate action requires a good understanding of the interactions between sectors, natural resource systems, and environmental externalities. The Climate Change Mitigation at CSTEP has undertaken a modelling study with the aim to provide such an understanding and help create scenarios for low-carbon development through the use of an interactive simulation tool called Sustainable Alternative Futures for India (SAFARI). You can access the tool here.
SAFARI estimates the energy, emissions, and resources implications of achieving developmental goals such as food, housing, healthcare, education, power for all, and transport up to 2050. The user interface allows you to explore these implications as well as the trade-offs between them. Using SAFARI, you can create integrated scenarios across sectors and test out the impact of policy choices on energy, emissions, and resources. Ultimately, we hope that this tool can be used to provide insights into developing and tracking India's long-term strategy (LTS) in line with the Paris Agreement. For more information, please contact safari@cstep.in
Climate finance and the Global South: Negotiating a fair future at COP29
At the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP29), India voiced its disappointment at the climate finance announcement of $300 billion annually under the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), and rightly so. This goal was
Local action amidst global inertia
After hours of intense negotiations, the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended with a climate finance goal where developed countries are to provide $300 billion annually by 2035. However, this is far from what the developing countries need, and once again brings global climate gridlock into the spotlight.
Why forests matter in climate finance discussions
COP29, the conference touted as the "finance COP," concluded recently in Baku and has shown promise and oversight in its treatment of nature within the climate agenda. The latest estimate of required financing stands at a staggering $1.3 trillion, a sharp contrast to the mere $300 billion pledged under the New Collective Quantitative Goal (NCQG), which remains contentious among many parties, especially the Global South. Moreover, the need, and therefore the estimates, keep increasing year-on-year with minimal mobilisation towards achieving these goals.
With 45 years to go, how sustainable is India’s road to net-zero?
Every year, climate action draws significant attention in the months leading up to the United Nations’ annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COPs). But the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election will likely have a greater impact on the planet’s climate future than COP29 itself, illustrating an important challenge in combating climate change: operationalising global cooperation towards a common cause even when national interests don’t align with it.
Budgeting for net zero: Government support needed to meet India’s clean energy goals
The Government of India has set ambitious goals to ramp up a range of clean technologies by 2030 to increase energy independence, security, and access while promoting industrial development and reducing air pollution and GHG emissions. To deliver on these goals, the government has introduced a suite of financial and non-financial support measures. But will these measures be sufficient to reach the goals in full and on time?
No silver bullet II: Land-use dynamics in India’s net-zero journey
The 'No Silver Bullet' series explores various potential pathways for India’s transition to net-zero emissions, discusses the challenges and constraints, and provides directional insights based on long-term modelling using system dynamics. To complement the findings from cost-optimisation models, simulation modelling based on systems thinking was used to determine the impact of competition for natural (and other) resources and the ensuing non-linear feedback dynamics.
COP16: Will financial roadblocks continue to hinder conservation efforts?
The 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity recently concluded in Cali, Colombia. Representatives from U.N. countries tried to negotiate measures to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, which threatens both human well-being and the stability of human societies. A key sticking point was who’d pay for implementing these measures and how much.