India Contributed 4.8% To Climate Crisis, Says New Research Paper

India has contributed 4.8% to the global mean surface temperature (GMST) change resulting from historical emissions of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide (N2O), a new research paper has said.

In comparison, United States contributed to 17.3% of the change – highest globally and China contributed to 12.3%, the paper published in Nature journal on Wednesday said. The largest contributors to warming up to 2021 through emissions of all three gases since 1850 were: US (0.28°C ); China (0.20°C ); Russia (0.10°C); Brazil (0.08°C ); India (0.08°C); Indonesia, Germany, UK, Japan, Canada (each contributing 0.03-0.05°C), authors of the paper said in a statement on Wednesday.

The paper titled “National contributions to climate change due to historical emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide since 1850”, authored by researchers from Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia (UEA); CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway; International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria among others said emissions from developed nations have contributed significantly to warming since the industrial revolution. “Tracking national contributions to climate change is thus critical to understanding the burden of responsibility that a country carries for global warming and can further inform the design of international policies that pursue equitable decarbonisation pathways,” it said.

This has also been the thrust of India’s position at climate negotiations.

Anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have contributed significantly to global warming since the pre-industrial period. There is a lot of interest in tracking national contributions to climate change and informing equitable commitments to decarbonisation, the researchers said. The study introduces a new dataset of national contributions to global warming caused by historical emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide during 1851–2021, which are consistent with the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the researchers said.

The paper is significant because it comes ahead of the Global Stocktake of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change scheduled to take place at UN Climate Conference (COP28) in Dubai this December. The global stocktake of the Paris Agreement (GST) is a process for taking stock of the implementation of the Paris Agreement by each country and sector. The Paris Agreement goal is to keep global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“While we focus on three CO2, CH4 and N2O that are included in most NDCs, we note that future work should seek to include other important GHGs, such as fluorinated gases (F-gases), which are also included in the NDCs of some countries,” researchers said. This dataset is publicly available via Zenodo repository.

The paper’s findings are consistent with India’s analysis. In response to a question in Rajya Sabha on India’s contribution to climate crisis, junior environment minister, Ashwini Kumar Choubey said in a written response that “India with more than 17% of the global population has contributed only about 4% of the global cumulative greenhouse gas emissions between 1850 and 2019. Reports from various sources, including Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, highlight that the challenges faced due to global warming are mainly due to cumulative historical and current greenhouse gas emissions of the developed countries. Even though, we are not part of the problem, India is part of the solution and is doing more than its fair share.”

“Contributions to temperature change from GHG emissions USA 17.3% contributing to 0.28°C; China 12.3% contributing to 0.20°C; EU 10.4% contributing to 0.17°C; Russia 6.1% contributing to 0.10°C; Brazil 4.9% contributing to 0.08°C; India 4.8% contributing to 0.08°C ;Indonesia 3.4%,” tweeted Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist from Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune referring to the paper.

National contributions and historical responsibility of emissions are very contentious . HT reported on March 26 that the negotiations leading to the latest synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revealed deep differences between wealthy nations and developing countries like India on funding needed to combat the climate crisis and the role of the developed world in precipitating the emergency.

HT reported on March 20 that the world is on course to overshoot the 1.5°C global warming threshold, which will lead to irreversible harm and risks for human and natural climate systems as per IPCC’s Synthesis Report with the authors portending the “worst impacts on India and South Asia” of the climate crisis.