New Delhi: During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to attend COP28 (the 28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), India will co-host two side events themed ‘Green Credit Initiative’ and ‘Lead IT 2.0’.
“Besides his participation in COP28, Prime Minister will be participating in three high-level side events of which two are being co-hosted by India,” Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra said during a media briefing ahead of Modi’s departure for Dubai. “The first high-level event that is being co-hosted by India and the UAE is the launch of the Green Credits Initiative… the second side event to be co-hosted by India and Sweden is the launch of Lead IT 2.0.”
So, what is the Green Credit Initiative?
“The Green Credit Initiative is based on the Green Credit Programme (GCP) that was notified by the Ministry of Environment in October this year,” Kwatra said. “It basically envisions the issue of Green Credits for plantations on waste and degraded lands and river catchment areas in order to restore their vitality.”
The GCP was notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on October 13. It is an innovative market-based mechanism designed to incentivise voluntary environmental actions across diverse sectors, by various stakeholders like individuals, communities, private sector industries, and companies. The GCP’s governance framework is supported by an inter-ministerial Steering Committee and the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) serves as the GCP administrator responsible for programme implementation, management, monitoring, and operation.
“In its initial phase, the GCP focuses on two key activities: water conservation and afforestation,” the Ministry said in a statement. “Draft methodologies for awarding Green Credits have been developed and will be notified for stakeholder consultation. These methodologies set benchmarks for each activity/process, to ensure environmental impact and fungibility across sectors. A user-friendly digital platform will streamline the processes for registration of projects, its verification, and issuance of Green Credits. The Green Credit Registry and trading platform, being developed by ICFRE along with experts, would facilitate the registration and thereafter, the buying and selling of Green Credits.”
Green Credit signifies a form of incentive allocated to individuals and entities actively involved in endeavours that yield favourable outcomes for the environment. This voluntary initiative, spearheaded by the government, aims to motivate diverse stakeholders to play a role in environmental conservation and adopt sustainable practices. Integral to the overarching 'LiFE' (Lifestyle for Environment) campaign, this programme actively promotes and acknowledges voluntary actions that contribute positively to the environment.
The Green Credit programme encompasses the following types of activities aimed at enhancing environmental sustainability: planting trees to increase green cover and combat deforestation; implementing strategies to efficiently manage and conserve water resources; promoting eco-friendly and sustainable agricultural practices; implementing effective waste management systems to reduce environmental pollution; initiatives aimed at reducing air pollution and improving air quality; and protecting and restoring mangrove ecosystems for ecological balance.
To accrue Green Credits, individuals must enlist their eco-friendly endeavours on a specialised government website. These activities will undergo scrutiny by an assigned agency. Upon receiving the agency's assessment, the administrator will issue a Green Credit certificate to the participant. The computation of Green Credits hinges on factors like resource needs, scale, scope, size, and other pertinent parameters crucial for attaining the intended environmental results.
An integral aspect of the initiative involves setting up a Green Credit Registry to effectively monitor and oversee accumulated credits. Furthermore, the administrator will institute and uphold a trading platform, facilitating the exchange of Green Credits within a domestic market. In such a trading system, businesses or individuals with surplus Green Credits can sell them to those who need to meet sustainability goals or regulatory requirements. This creates a market-driven mechanism to encourage and reward environment-friendly practices. The second side event, which India will co-host, this time with Sweden, during the course of COP28 is LeadIT 2.0.
What is LeadIT 2.0?
“The second side event that will be co-hosted by India and Sweden is the launch of LeadIT 2.0,” Foreign Secretary Kwatra said during Thursday’s briefing. “It is essentially a leadership group for industry transition. This was a joint initiative launched by India and Sweden in 2019 at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. Essentially, this initiative fosters collaboration among the decision-makers bringing together both the public sector and the private sector with the objective of accelerating the industry transition to net zero emissions essentially from heavy industries.”
LeadIT stands for Leadership for Industry Transition. The LeadIT initiative places particular emphasis on challenging sectors crucial to global climate action that necessitate targeted interventions. It brings together nations and businesses dedicated to fulfilling the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal is to keep the rise in mean global temperature to well below 2oC above pre-industrial levels, and preferably limit the increase to 1.5oC, recognising that this would substantially reduce the effects of climate change. Emissions should be reduced as soon as possible and reach net zero by the middle of the 21st century.
Introduced during the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 by the governments of Sweden and India, it enjoys support from the World Economic Forum. Members of LeadIT share the conviction that energy-intensive industries have the capacity and obligation to transition towards low-carbon trajectories, aspiring to attain net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
According to the LeadIT website, a successful transition for hard-to-abate sectors requires a level playing field globally, finance for implementation, accountability across value chains, low-carbon technology diffusion and scale-up, and enabling infrastructure. “To accelerate this, we foster collaboration between decision-makers in the public and private sector to enable the needed policy environment, finance flows, and exchange of best practice,” the website definition of the initiative reads.
It states that this can be done by convening and participating in high-level dialogues to set the international agenda to align on actions for net-zero; holding regular meetings between private and public decarbonisation experts; supporting road-mapping processes with science-based tools and workshops; tracking plans and investments to decarbonize heavy industry sectors; and carrying out analysis that informs policymaking.
