INDIA’S GHG Emissions Profile: Results of Five Climate Modelling Studies

The effort has been to ensure that these studies are fact-based and objective and are not seen as a “government study”. We believe that the debates and negotiations on climate change are best served by rigorous and non-partisan analyses of GHG emissions profiles. One of the interesting findings of this Report is that there is a broad convergence across the five studies in the estimates of India’s aggregate GHG emissions and per capita GHG emissions over the next two decades. As these studies indicate, India’s aggregate and per capita emissions over the next two decades will remain quite modest. The per capita GHG emissions of India (average across the five studies) are estimated to be 2.1 tonnes of CO2e1 in the year 2020, and 3.5 tonnes of CO2e in the year 2030. For the sake of comparison, it is notable that the estimated per capita emissions of India in 2020 are expected to be well below those of the developed countries, even if the developed countries were to take ambitious emission reduction targets (25-40%) as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the mid-term.