Rural communities are among the most vulnerable globally to climate change. India’s unique geographical and socioeconomic fabric makes it susceptible to climate-related adversities. The social cost of carbon in India is estimated at approximately $90 per tonne, indicating a severe and unequal burden for every tonne of CO2 released.
Our agricultural sector, once robust, now grapples with soil acidification and the indiscriminate use of chemical fertilisers, reducing its resilience to droughts, storms and heatwaves. This situation underscores the urgent need for innovative solutions.
The key to mitigating the impacts of rising CO2 levels lies in rapid decarbonisation and de-fossilisation, coupled with effective and durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies. Even with rapid decarbonisation, dangerous legacy emissions will remain in the atmosphere, which must be removed. Emissions that cannot be avoided in the required timescale due to political, social or economic constraints must also be offset with removal from the atmosphere. This requirement is highlighted by IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, which projects the need to remove 4.7-9.8 bn tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050.
CDR activities include both non-permanent nature-based solutions, such as regenerative farming, soil carbon sequestration, afforestation, agroforestry and mangroves, and engineered permanent removal solutions, such as biochar carbon removal (BCR), enhanced rock weathering (ERW), direct air capture (DAC) and others.
Apart from cleaning the air, engineered solutions like BCR and ERW have significant co-benefits to agroecology, soil health and climate resilience, including transforming poor-quality arid soils into productive land, improving agricultural yields and enhancing water retention.A recent white paper by Carbon Removal India Alliance (CRIA) has highlighted that India is uniquely positioned to become a world leader in large-scale, permanent CO2 removal. India could remove 900 mn tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. This amounts to 10-30% of the world’s durable atmospheric CDR, requiring harnessing its natural, technological and policy strengths.In addition to providing a global service, developing a robust CDR sector could revolutionise India’s agricultural system, reduce air pollution, create employment opportunities and generate $90 bn per year in export revenue, while attracting FDI and creating new green industrial products.
Global trends and mandated country net-zero targets will require high-quality and durable CDR to act as offsets. Countries like Switzerland, Japan and Singapore are recognising that they must look beyond their borders for these offsets. This opens the door to massive capital transfers from historical emitters to countries like India, which are most vulnerable to climate change. India, with the world’s second-largest supply of biomass and abundant supply of basalt rock and saline storage underground, can be a global powerhouse of CDR production and offset supply to the world.
Demand for CDR is evident in the corporate sector, with giants like Microsoft, Stripe, Google, Airbus, Amazon and others purchasing billions of dollars worth carbon-removal credits. This trend underscores the need to differentiate between CO2 reduction and removal, recognise the durability of removals and understand associated risks.
To date, carbon-removal policy has focused on tree cover. However, the focus needs to expand to include other innovative solutions, with a longer duration of removal and lower risk of reversing the capture and storage, such as BCR and ERW. Recent inclusion of BCR in the Bureau of Energy Efficiency’s list for sectoral scope under the offset mechanism in the Indian carbon market is a big step. It will send a strong signal to the Indian corporate sector to look at CDR with greater interest and invest in both – as developers/suppliers and carbon-removal credit buyers. Eventually, other CDR methods, such as ERW, should also be included in the list.
India can lead the world in managing the world’s carbon emissions in a manner that safeguards food security, cleans air, restores soils and spearheads an industry envied worldwide. It is time for India to grasp this opportunity and emerge as a global leader in durable carbon removal and fight climate change.