Spatiotemporal changes in district-level carbon emissions in India, 2019–2024

Abstract Non-technical summary. India needs to balance carbon mitigation with its developmental priorities. The Indian district acts as an important administrative site where national- and state-level developmental and environmental policies are translated into ground-level implementation. In this work, we provide a replicable approach to analyze the evolution of district-level carbon emissions in near real-time. Our work shows that emissions are concentrated in a small number of districts, with this concentration increasing over time. We also find significant inter-district variation in the growth of emissions. We demonstrate the utility of high-resolution emissions data through three examples. Technical summary. With India accounting for a growing share of world emissions, the country's carbon emissions trajectory is important from a global mitigation perspective. At the same time, India is simultaneously attempting to achieve both environmental and developmental goals. The district acts as an administrative site that is important for India's future trajectory, as developmental and environmental policies at the national and state levels get translated to actual implementation at the district level. In this work, we study the evolution of carbon emissions at the district level in India. We rely on the GRACED dataset that provides daily emissions information for various sectors at a spatial resolution of 0.1°. We find that 7% of districts account for ∼50% of total emissions, while the bottom 50% contribute less than 9%. This spatial concentration is intensifying over time. We also document variations in the contribution of different sectors to total emissions over the year. We demonstrate the utility of high-resolution emissions data through three examples. Our approach can aid researchers and policymakers in developing targeted interventions as it is easily replicable, goes beyond existing work in its spatial and temporal resolution, and can be adapted to study district emissions in near-real time. Social media summary. We provide a replicable approach to assess the evolution of India's district-level carbon emissions in near-real-time.