The following is an excerpt from an article in TerraGreen by Meera Gopal, Senior Program Officer, Climate, of Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI). 

The year 2023 was a watershed moment for India — with the G20 presidency and the Clean Energy Ministerial. The country has been actively positioning itself as a leader of the Global South — which became the driver of the G20 success — with India delivering a consensus-based communique despite all contrary predictions. India’s engagement leading up to 28th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP28), in tandem with its G20 priorities, focused on climate finance as a key issue, with targeted engagement on issues such as the new collective quantified goal (post-2025 climate finance goal). At the Leaders’ Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted India’s early achievement of the emissions’ intensity reduction targets and proposed hosting COP33 in 2028, when the next Global Stocktake is scheduled to take place. Internationally, thus, India has emerged as a unique leader, bridging the Global North and the Global South, experts have attributed it to India’s four cooperation tracks on multilateral, minilateral, trilateral, and bilateral levels. 

However, domestically, things are more challenging. Despite being ranked seventh on the Climate Change Performance Index which evaluates climate policies of countries, it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the opening session of the high-level segment of COP28 found that India needs to strengthen the implementation of its climate policies and make them more effective. India, thus, faces a dichotomy — of pursuing a leadership role at a global stage and perpetuating a fragmented system of climate governance with weak implementation. Three key areas where India outshined rest of the developing countries in pushing for stronger climate commitments have been discussed next. 

Read the full article in TerraGreen.