
India in 2023: strides in climate action, criticism of conservation
The Hindu
India took meaningful action to combat climate change, enhance wildlife conservation & host COP33, launching a 'Green Credit Initiative' & increasing tiger population. Criticism arose over cheetah translocation & forest law changes.
India spurred meaningful action to combat climate change and enhance wildlife conservation in 2023, but criticism arose regarding the cheetah translocation project and changes in forest and biodiversity laws.
The country put forth a proposal to host the U.N. climate conference in 2028, or COP33, and also launched a ‘Green Credit Initiative’ focused on creating carbon sinks to address the challenges posed by a rapidly warming world.
At the historic climate summit in Dubai in December, developing countries, including India, asked rich nations to vacate carbon space by achieving negative carbon emissions (removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than emitted), not merely reaching net zero by 2050.
A group of international scientists said in December India’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions rose by around 5% in 2022 to reach two tonnes but these were still less than half of the global average (4.7 tonnes).
India submitted its third national communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on December 9. According to it, the country reduced GDP emission intensity by 33% between 2005 and 2019, achieving the target 11 years in advance.
It also created an additional carbon sink of 1.97 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent during this period.
Data released in July showed the number of tigers in India have increased from 2,967 in 2018 to 3,682 in 2022, an annual rise of six percent.