India has been shown the “green light” by the Traffic Light Assessment Report, 2023, which is a progress report on 195 countries that are party to the Paris Agreement. India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the TLAR says, are the only four major economies currently on track to meet the targets for 2030 that were pledged in Paris. The report revealed a starkly unequal picture — the most developed countries responsible for 80% of the world’s pollution are doing the least to meet their targets, while the countries that are on track to meet their commitments are the poorest economies that are most likely to bear the brunt of climate change. India is, indeed, implementing some actions to achieve its goals: for instance, it has one of the most rapidly developing renewable energy sectors in the world. But it has some distance to cover to ensure that it honours all its promises made in the Paris pact. Consider India’s reliance on fossil fuels, one of the major stumbling blocks to its climate commitments. In September last year, India proposed 99 new coal mines and mine expansions; subsidies for fossil fuels are also nine times higher than renewables. Additionally, when India updated its Paris targets last year, its goal of creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 remained stagnant. Further, official surveys of forest cover in India count plantations — these are not as effective as carbon sinks — in their overall tally, raising questions about the quality of interventions. There are thus reasons for the Climate Action Tracker to rate India’s climate targets and actions as “highly insufficient”.

India cannot rest on its laurels; but the task for the developed economies seems to be steeper. The COP28 Summit next month would be a perfect opportunity to put the findings of the TLAR, 2023 in perspective. They make two things clear. First, the global consensus on the need to expedite climate action remains high on rhetoric but weak on implementing meaningful interventions. Second, the inertia can be largely attributed to the developed world’s failure to not only meet its Paris targets but also reneging on its promises of facilitating climate actions — the sharing of finances, for instance — for developing and poorer nations. Setting up a mechanism to hold countries accountable for failing to meet their targets can be the way forward. India, as the voice of the Global South, must demand such accountability — from itself and the world.