Paper: GS – III, Subject: Environment and Ecology, Topic: Biodiversity and its Conservation, Issue: Safeguarding India’s Carbon Market.
Context:
India’s carbon market under CCTS must include strong safeguards to protect land rights, community consent, and fair benefits, ensuring climate justice alongside sustainable growth.
Key Highlights:
The Need for Decoupling Growth from Environmental Harm:
- The traditional industrial model has exhausted planetary limits.
- For developing countries like India, “degrowth” is not an option due to ongoing challenges of poverty and hunger.
- The solution lies in sustainable growth expanding the economy while reducing emissions through: Clean technologies, Renewable energy (e.g., solar expansion), Sustainable agriculture (e.g., micro-irrigation)
Understanding Carbon Credits:
- A carbon credit represents a verified reduction or removal of greenhouse gases (GHGs), measured in CO₂-equivalents.
- Credits are generated from: Mitigation projects renewable energy, energy efficiency, Sequestration projects afforestation, agroforestry, biochar.
- India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS): Launched to develop a national carbon market. Key features include:
- Emission-intensity benchmarks for high-emission sectors, Voluntary offset mechanisms, a national registry and trading platform for transparency
Draft methodologies have been released for: Biomass-based energy, Compressed biogas (CBG), Low-emission rice cultivation.
Global Lessons: Risks from Other Carbon Projects: The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project (NKRCP) highlights major pitfalls: Lack of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), Weak land rights protections, Opaque governance and unfair benefit distribution
- The project faced suspension by Verra (the world’s leading carbon standard body) due to flawed soil carbon measurements and violations of indigenous rights.
- Similarly, Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power project fenced off community lands, displacing herders showing how “green” projects can harm local livelihoods.
India’s carbon market can drive climate mitigation and rural empowerment if it ensures land rights, community consent, transparent benefits, and inclusive, well-regulated, community-centric implementation.
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