Climate mitigation and adaptation with challenges, opportunities, and solutions

Climate change is very likely to cause radical changes in forest types in India, eventually leading to irreversible ecological damage and even eventual species extinction, with consequent adverse socio-economic effects on local communities. Projections indicate that 47% and 42% of tropical dry deciduous forests are likely to undergo shifts under A2 and B2 SRES scenarios, respectively, compared with less than 16% in tropical wet evergreen forests. Moreover, the tropical thorny scrub forests under A2 and B2 scenarios may undergo changes in more than 80% and 50%, respectively, of the forested areas. These changes necessitate adaptive management strategies addressing both ecological and socio-economic challenges by incorporating climate concerns into the long-term forest management policies. While novel and progressive forest policies have been developed in India, mechanisms to ensure due implementation of those policies and adaptation responses to climate impacts remain at wish. Further approaches might be necessary that could deal with the scale, uncertainty, and accuracy issues of the assessments of climate impacts. Meanwhile, India has to tread the thorny path of sustaining growth for 1.4 billion people while exploring ways to bring greenhouse gas emissions in line with its net-zero commitment by 2070. Indeed, the current policy on renewables and decreasing reliance on coal is in the right direction, but much more is yet to be done. Bringing down greenhouse gas emissions may hurt growth in the short term and present some distributional challenges, at least in coal-dependent communities. The implication is that it will take action to avoid economic damage, but the costs of such action can be reduced by appropriate policy frameworks. This paper reviews the current status of the Indian climate policy landscape and modeling of emissions trajectories to outline effective mitigation strategies.