Developing Country Participation in Addressing Climate Change:
Research on policy instruments for achievement of India's NDCs
Work Package 2

Objective

The overall objective of the project was to contribute to the policy discourses on implementing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the post-2020 agreement, role of international cooperation (on finance and technology), and address gender dimension in mitigation actions.

Main Activities

The project will be implemented through five parallel activities enumerated as follows:

• Tracking of NDCs and domestic linkages with Sustainable Development Goals

  The activity attempted to track all NDCs for its linkages between NDCs and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Preliminary work involved capturing in a web-based tool (www.ndcfootprints.org), that provided a platform for academicians, researchers, and even other enthusiasts on the subject to easily access a compact and comprehensive interactive tool for understanding NDC and SDG complementarities. The web app provided an overarching view of each country’s profile in terms of the economic indicators, climate action chronology as well as the linkage chart. There is also a separate tab for accessing region-wise NDC–SDG target matches in order to acquire an overview of how Asia as a region responds to the linkage.

  Another part of this activity addressed three broad questions—1) how are India’s NDCs placed in international context in comparison with other submitted NDCs?; 2) domestically, how India’s NDC can contribute in achieving its SDGs?; and 3) what will be the role of different actors in the implementation of India’s NDC?

• Leveraging Climate Finance: Lessons from international and domestic best practices

  Climate finance landscape has rapidly evolved since the quantified commitments were made in Copenhagen in 2009. New institutions have been built, such as the Green Climate Fund, which have also started to deliver finance. Outside the UNFCCC context, bilateral and domestically mobilized finance have also increased. Since public finance alone will be insufficient, the role of private finance has become increasingly important. This activity mapped private climate finance landscape in India: identified main financial actors, key area/sector investments, barriers and challenges to mobilize private climate finance. The activity also included drawing up a list of successful business models across regions and sectors to overcome the barriers and studying them from the lens of impact, innovation, replicability, and scale. Conditions for transferability of select best practices in India will also be studied.

• Technology co-operation needs for implementing and enhancing India’s INDCs

  India’s INDCs are conditional on international support on technology transfer, finance, and capacity building. A non-exhaustive list of technologies has also been included. The Paris Agreement has broadened the scope of the technology mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to also include joint R&D. Technology-centric transformational actions will play a critical role in achieving India’s NDC and maximizing SDG co-benefits. In this context, this activity focussed on identifying specific cooperation needs, including international mechanisms, relating to technology development, transfer, and diffusion that will not only enable India to implement her INDCs but would also be instrumental in increasing the impact. This activity aimed at big impact technologies which require specific international cooperation. To this end, it is important to first analyse the Indian NDCs to identify various options and underlying technologies. Subsequently, a few big impact options with greater international cooperation needs related to technology development, transfer, and diffusion were identified through stakeholder and expert consultations. The attempt ensured detailed analysis of the selected options enabled comprehensive understanding of scope of enhancing socio-economic as well as mitigation benefits in at least one sector relevant to India’s NDC.

• Gender and mitigation efforts: Issues and prospects

  This activity examined the gender dimensions of activities listed in the above activities. Since the gender question has been defined in multiple ways and contexts, it is important to apply a comprehensive framework of analysis while analysing gender dimensions of mitigation actions, including international collaboration. The first major component would be to develop a comprehensive framework of analysis that goes beyond numerical representation of various gender groups among the beneficiaries of a project or policy and also includes qualitative aspects ranging from the process of conception of idea to implementation and benefit sharing. In order to generate empirical evidence on gender in the context of overall objective of this project activity, we will focus on learning from other country experiences regarding ensuring gender equality in implementing mitigation actions and international cooperation. This will be ensured by undertaking case studies on the aforementioned themes.

• Knowledge sharing, dialogue, and outreach

  • Regular dialogues with all relevant stakeholders will be organized. The specific purpose of these dialogues will be to:
    • Build capacity of the stakeholders by updating them on the developments on NDCs and research under activities 1 to 4;
    • Seek inputs on the research being conducted in the project and disseminate findings under various activities
  • For wider dissemination of project findings, the project will regularly publish working papers, policy briefs, and organize dissemination events, including during UNFCCC meetings.
  • A regular quarterly issue of ‘Mitigation Talks: A Series on Nationally Determined Contributions’ will be published to initiate discussions around the above themes and present some early findings.

Norwegian Partner: CICERO