World Needs To Bet On India As A Green Staging Post, Says Climate Adviser Rachel Kyte
There is potential for India to meet its own climate goals and also support other countries in achieving targets, Kyte said.
There is potential for India to meet its climate goals and also support other countries in achieving their targets with adequate foreign investments, climate adviser and academic Rachel Kyte said.
"A lot of the solutions for the world can originate here. We kind of need to make big bets on India," Kyte, the dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University, told BloombergQuint in an interview. "I am not underestimating the complexity of turning India into a green staging post. But, the possibility and route is certainly there."
Kyte, who is also a member of the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Action, is on a visit to India for interacting with policymakers, businesses and think tanks about efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Kyte during a conference in Ontario, Canada. (Photographer: James MacDonald/Bloomberg)
Beyond leading the push for solar adoption through the International Solar Alliance, India is also serious about becoming a hub for manufacturing green hydrogen and green ammonia, she said. "Everybody I've encountered here is thinking about this."
However, none of this will be easy for India to achieve without adequate financing. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted that financial flows are still three-to-six times below what is needed by 2030 to keep global warming under 2 degree Celsius. That makes it particularly challenging for developing countries to close that gap without external assistance.
That's not an impossible thing to do, according to Kyte. "There's enough cash in the world. Last year, we saw incredible amounts of money—$150 trillion—being committed to achieving net zero emissions," she said. "We need to take this pool of capital and connect it to projects. We need credit enhancement. None of this is rocket science or new. But we need to do this with speed and scale."
According to Kyte, politics has let down the science around climate change, especially with regards to financial assistance. "We've been fighting over the $100 billion pledge by rich nations to poor countries for their transition. That's a totemic promise that has been broken. We need to fulfill the promise. There's trillions of dollars of private investment that needs to start flowing."
Kyte warned political leaders that not taking climate action may end up proving costlier in the long run. "Intellectually, many of them understand that. Politically, they feel constrained over short-term election needs."
"We need political leaders... who can wear progressive glasses and look at the mid-century net zero target for a world where we're at peace with nature," she said. "We're not electing leaders who can do long-term and short-term at the same time."
Here are edited excerpts of the interview...
What has been your takeaway from India on the efforts towards tackling the climate crisis so far?
Rachel Kyte: The world is at a very fragile point. So, you can see the route for India to not only meet its own climate goals but also become a staging point for support to other countries to meet their climate goals. We're not only talking about the support to International Solar Alliance but now also the possibilities of ramping up production to make green ammonia, green hydrogen and the likes—everybody I've encountered is thinking about this.
I don't underestimate the complexity of what this means domestically, and the complexity of turning India into a green staging post. But the possibility is certainly there. However, it is a complex time. Supply chains are completely disrupted. We've got fuel and food price spikes with inflation. We've got the war which has dislocated energy markets. It is messy.
But there is a direction of travel for India and its businesses to pursue. And I actually think the world needs India to pursue it. A lot of the solutions for the world can originate here. I don't look at this with rose-tinted glasses. But given the IPCC report telling us that we've got no time at all, we kind of need to make big bets on India.
The IPCC report has said that financial flows are still three to six times lower than what we need by 2030 to keep global warming below 2 degree Celsius. How big of a challenge is it for developing nations like India?
Rachel Kyte: Three to six times, that's not impossible to do. There's enough cash in the world. What happened last year, we saw incredible amounts of money—$150 trillion—being committed to achieving net zero emissions. They're not interested in funding coal and oil or gas. They're interested in green assets, green energy, a mobility revolution, new technologies in agriculture and land management and solar capture. They're interested in all the things we need more of.
We need to take this pool of capital and connect it to projects. We need credit enhancement. We need to use public money to pull that private money into this. None of this is rocket science or new. But we need to do this with speed and scale.
I feel like the politics kind of lets down the science. Because the science is absolutely clear. Technologically, we've got much of what we need. We now need to deploy it.
Of course, some innovations are still necessary. We need some technologies to refine and some things we haven't thought of yet. But if we just deploy the technologies we already have, we'll be in better shape. When I saw the three-to-six times number, I thought: 'We could surely do that'.
Politically, we've been fighting over the $100 billion pledge by rich nations. That's a totemic promise that has been broken. We need to fulfill the promise.Rachel Kyte, Climate Adviser
There's trillions of dollars of private investments that needs to start flowing, including domestic investments. Investments from things like pension funds should only be going into green energy now.
Politicians are saying the right words on climate action. But those don't translate to allocation inside annual budgets and election manifestos. What will it take for them to walk the talk on climate change?
Rachel Kyte: It will take for them to understand that it will be more costly to not do anything than to do something.
Intellectually, many of them understand that. Politically, they feel constrained. They feel the short-term election needs are going to need to be fought. I think they underestimate the public. The people are living with the impact of climate change. They know. Even an undereducated person living in poverty knows. They see the change in seasons, they see the changes in rain. They deserve to be told the truth.
In a number of countries, there's an incumbent system which is all around oil and gas. And all the lobby money is around oil and gas. In the U.S., the political system is just awash with that money. Then it isn't surprising that you have political leaders who's own personal wealth comes from oil and gas. We need politicians who are going to stand up to the lobby.
There's an extraordinary amount of money that flows into persuading people to keep on going with the status quo.Rachel Kyte, Climate Adviser
If you look at the U.K., and you look at the newspapers. There's facts and there's opinions. And unsurprisingly, the extreme opinions are linked to the dark money that's coming into lobbying for oil and gas.
One of two things is going to happen. Investors are going to start worrying that the whole system is going to collapse, and/ or their consumers, many of them young people, are going to decide to vote with their feet. You are going to see one or both of those things start to happen. But it is not happening everywhere yet.
Do we then need a system that looks beyond the four or five-year election cycles to tackle the climate crisis?
Rachel Kyte: I don't know how you do that. It's not like some sort of global government will come down to tell everybody what to do.
But it means that we do need to have better international cooperation. The United Nations is where everybody comes together. But now, we've seen the charge of the UN challenged fundamentally by Russia in deciding to vote against the resolution on ending the war in Ukraine.
The international system of cooperation that we designed was done in the middle of the 20th century by a few countries who were the victors of the World War II. Going forward 75 years, who would we have in the room to decide how we organise things? Some governments? Maybe a few global businesses? Those from civil society? I don't know. It'll be very difficult.
The geopolitical fractures that have emerged this year, do they threaten to delay the energy transition?
Rachel Kyte: Absolutely. At the moment, no one has walked away from the 2030 target despite the fact that Europe has to go buy gas from somewhere else. Nobody has used the war as an excuse to ignore the climate targets. Although, some politicians in some countries are arguing for that.
The IPCC report also highlighted that large sums of climate finance is going towards mitigation and less so towards adaptation. Are our cities and towns ready to face the extremities that climate change is triggering?
Rachel Kyte: Most cities and towns don't even know the range of impacts that they are going to experience. They certainly don't have the finances and resources to cope with them. Extreme heat, storm patterns, extreme rains, influx of climate change-displaced migrants—there's a whole range of impacts.
That isn't to say that cities aren't an important leader in climate action. I just think most towns and cities of the world don't have the requisite capabilities which will be important to help them build them up right.
In this race to net-zero emissions, have we lost focus on ecological conservation?
Rachel Kyte: The imagination has been mostly captured by the need to reduce emissions. So, we have to electrify everything, find alternative energy sources for hard-to-abate sectors, and then we need to fund adaption and loss and damages.
Most of the attention has gone on the large ticket items of cleaning up the energy system. There's been a lot of investment going into the mobility transition, which becomes possible if you have an energy transition.
What hasn't happened yet is the adaption. Not enough money is going into that.
Adaptation has been the agenda of the countries living with climate impacts. However, mitigation has been the agenda of the G20 or so. I think there's a mismatch there.
A big part of mitigation, and an even bigger part of adaption is nature. The health of our forests, the health of our soil, the health of the blue economy—mangroves, seagrasses and coastal waters. This is huge. And we're not investing anything like enough in the ability of nature to help us both mitigate and adapt.
The work I am doing with the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative is to reduce emissions and eventually remove them. But also build a carbon market that secures a steady flow of resources into countries who will need those for their adaptation and resilience. It's an additional flow of finance. But it's going to be hard to do it.