At COP27, India Releases Its Long-Term Low Emissions And Development Strategies To Reach Net Zero By 2070: Report

COP27: India released its Long-Term Low Emissions and Development Strategies (LT-LEDS) in the second week of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt.

COP27: Bhupender Yadav, Union Minister of Environment, Forests, Climate Change and Labour of India speaking during a session at the 27th UN Climate Change Conference, on November 14, 2022.

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COP27: India released its Long-Term Low Emissions and Development Strategies (LT-LEDS) in the second week of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt. The LT-LEDS state the steps India will take to achieve net zero by 2070, news agency Reuters reports. 

All countries are required to submit reports showing how they will achieve the Paris Agreement's goal. The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change signed in 2015 at COP21 in Paris, has the goal of limiting global warming to well below two degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. Countries aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve the long-term temperature goal. This will help achieve a climate-neutral world by mid-century. 

According to a Reuters report, only 56 countries, including India, have submitted LT-LEDS to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) so far. Other countries include the United States, China and Japan. 

UNFCCC report on LT-LEDS

According to a UNFCCC report published on October 26, as many as 53 countries had submitted their long-term low-emission development strategies to the secretariat, as of September 23, 2022. The 53 countries represent 62 Parties to the Paris Agreement. 

According to the report, the parties that communicated the strategies together account for 83 per cent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 47 per cent of the global population, and around 69 per cent of total energy consumption in 2019. 

In their LT-LEDS, the Parties underline their commitment to achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement because climate change has already caused and will continue to cause challenges related to national development. The LT-LEDS also communicate a long-term mitigation goal.

The report said that if Parties were to collectively start reducing emissions in 2020 with a view to achieving their 2050 targets, and those reductions remained constant over the next three decades, the average emission reduction rate per annum between 2030 and 2059 would have been 0.8 percentage points lower than currently foreseen.