Speaker: Tejal Kanitkar, Associate Professor, Energy Environment Programme, NIAS
Chairperson: Shailesh Nayak, Director, NIAS
About the lecture:
With the introduction of specific temperature targets in the Paris Agreement, the exploration of mitigation scenarios that are compatible with these temperature goals has become increasingly important in climate policy. We have seen the inclusion of ‘numbers’ for emissions reductions in the decisions of the 26th and 27th Conference of Parties held in Glasgow and Sharm El Sheikh respectively. Calls for mitigation in specific sectors (e.g., coal, agriculture, forests) have also become more prominent in more recent COP decisions. Where do these emissions reduction numbers come from? Where do the prescriptions of sectoral strategies come from? What are the frameworks that are being used to construct these imaginations of possible climate-compatible futures, and what are the challenges they pose, especially from the perspective of the global South? Some of these questions become critical as we move to 2023 when the first Global Stocktake (GST) under Article 14 of the Paris Agreement will take place. The GST is supposed to “assess the collective progress towards achieving the Paris Agreement goals….in the light of equity and best available science”. This talk will try to address some of the questions and the concomitant climate policy challenges for the global South.
About the speaker:
Tejal Kanitkar, Associate Professor in the Energy and Environment Program, NIAS. She works on energy planning, policy, and climate change mitigation.