All ministries are working diligently to prepare their vision for 2047 as part of Vision India@2047. Here is how India can march towards Net Zero by 2070, while becoming weather-ready and climate-resilient, with a clear pathway to sustainability.
India can expect robust economic growth with an increasing contribution from the Blue Economy by 2047, achieving a per capita GDP and Human Development Index comparable to the developed world. More importantly, India is envisioned to accomplish this with minimal environmental footprints, ensuring continued sustainable development towards Net Zero by 2070 or earlier.
Among the big challenges of national security, energy independence, food, water and housing security, and education for all, the overarching threat is the growing climate impacts on all sectors. Moreover, the climate vulnerabilities of neighbouring countries are bound to become India’s national security and economic threats, apart from natural disasters. Vision India@2047 must be fully prepared to manage these challenges in addition to weather-readiness and climate resilience.
Inter-ministerial coordination for managing climate hazards & sustainability challenges
Governance always requires ministries to manage the complex task of governing and budget allocations. Building weather-readiness and climate resilience will require that ministries do not work in silos. Nimble teams with different ministries in charge will be needed to respond rapidly with scientific and technological innovations, weather and climate predictions, sectoral early warnings, mapping vulnerability, hazards, exposures, and risks, and building data networks to create digital twins.
Climate adaptation and mitigation need synergy between different ministries such as MoEFCC, MoES, DA&FW, Jal Shakti (water resources), DST, DBT, and MeitY. MoES can lead the data networks, modelling infrastructure, and AI/ML-driven downscaling of dynamic model predictions and projections to meet stakeholder needs at the spatial and temporal scales for decisions. These decisions pertain to heatwaves, extreme rainfall, floods, droughts, health outbreaks, crop damages, and more.
Working in verticals to synergise goals, strategies, plans, implementations
The sustainability challenge is best strategised by working in a matrix of verticals and cross-cutting issues. Verticals will be needed for water, agriculture, energy, carbon, health, transportation, buildings, and infrastructure with early warnings at timescales of days to weeks and seasons to a decade or two. It is imperative to quantify all the natural carbon sources and sinks and identify levers to reduce sources and enhance sinks with nature-based solutions, regenerative agriculture, managing the food-water-energy-health nexus, and so on.
Ministries in the lead need to coordinate with other ministries when it comes to managing location-specific risks, vulnerabilities, hazards, and responses, as well as adaptations at decadal and longer timescales. Adaptation and mitigation will be synergised to exploit overlaps and common resource and technology needs. This will ensure that the entire nation can stay on the pathway to sustainability and net zero, and will also allow the mainstreaming of sustainability into fiscal policies and budget processes.
Budgets for each ministry will be protected to avoid conflicts, but each team will be able to seek information, scientific and technological assistance, and deployment of resources belonging to any ministry for managing short-, medium-, and long-term disaster responses, adaptation, and mitigation actions to build resilience.
Resilience here will not just mean recovery to pre-disaster functionality but building back better with rapid recovery to a full-speed march on the sustainability pathway. Resilience will also ensure that any unavoidable deviations from the sustainability pathway will be quickly corrected to return safely and rapidly to the sustainability pathway.
Paving the sustainability pathway
By 2047, the sustainability pathway must be well paved. This requires not only synergy between all ministries but also a fully networked and co-developed action plan across all institutions, including academic and governmental, state and local agencies, down to the last mile where decisions are made on food, agriculture, water, energy, health, transportation, infrastructure, buildings, and so on.
Each ministry in charge of specific action items on the sustainable pathway will monitor and evaluate the line of command and smooth transfer of information to bring government and citizens closer as envisioned for Vision India@2047. Stress testing of the system with each disaster will ensure resilience and evaluations will document progress towards sustainability.
The MoES-led team will track hazards, vulnerability, exposure, and resilience of each village, town, city, and community to ensure that nobody is left behind and no weather system goes unnoticed. Sustainability will also be accomplished with minimal environmental footprint. Mitigation will keep pace with the net zero goals and global commitments and India’s climate leadership goals. All levers to reduce vulnerabilities, exposures, and risks will be identified. These typically include education for women and girls, safe homes and infrastructure, access to hospitals, healthcare and finance, and effective and skillful early warning systems for all. The role of the private sector in energy, agriculture, water and health must be fully integrated into the public systems.
All ministries will drive innovation, research, development, and implementations in each sector to achieve sustainability and ensure that the guardrails are in place to avoid driving off the sustainability pathway.
Role of governments, agencies, institutions
All governments will be fully networked into a line of command to ensure the flow of information to minimise detours from sustainability and net zero. Disaster preparedness, management, recovery, and mitigation are necessary, but rapid returns to the sustainability pathway will be ensured by the network of non-profits and academic institutions.
Non-profits will work closely with all relevant governments and agencies to drive capacity building of individuals and communities to ensure that they are part of the safe drive on the sustainability pathway. Every man, woman, and child must have agency to realise the full benefits of the sustainability drive and accomplish their dreams of a better life.
The vast country with its disparate climate regimes will need regional centres as sustainability hubs. One can imagine the country being administered via the regional centres in the east, west, north, south, and northeast, with the islands being included appropriately in one of the centres.
Each centre will need location- and sector-specific early warning systems and sustainability indicators which are best managed by academic institutions playing their part. For example, each IIT and IISER can lead the network of local institutions to coordinate the local mapping of risk, vulnerability, hazards, exposure, and disaster responses needed along with the data network to monitor hazards and the socioeconomic vulnerabilities and exposures. Innovations in instrumentation and optimisation of data gathering, synthesising, and dissemination will be the responsibility of these regional centres. The private sector will be involved at all appropriate levels to bring science to serve society for sustainability and net zero.
Each regional centre will then be richly populated with all the data, decision-support, early warnings, and information at decision horizons out to a decade or two. Decadal timescale earth system information will require a modelling infrastructure, large pieces of which are already in place at IMD, IITM Pune, NCMRWF, and INCOIS. The integration of research and development at academic institutions with these national prediction centres will be critical for the effective and efficient delivery of climate services.
Earth system prediction and projection infrastructure
India has made massive investments in weather and climate predictions and early warnings for disaster management. The National Disaster Management Agency has achieved the mammoth task of reducing the loss of life and property with incredible success. It can only get better and play a bigger role in keeping the nation’s economy thriving on the sustainability pathway.
India will have a fully-implemented Earth System Predictions for the verticals mentioned above at spatial resolutions of around one kilometre. The public-private-academic collaboration will have the AI/ML tools to bring these predictions to neighbourhood scales and farm scales to provide complete decision support for safe navigation of all sectors and resources on the sustainability pathway.
A complete integration of the Earth System Model (ESM) with the data network will be a functional digital twin, which will thrive on anticipating hazards and minimising impacts while driving rapid and full recovery back to the sustainable pathway.
ESM will also model the marine and terrestrial carbon cycles, which will be blended with the observations of all relevant fluxes to track the carbon fluxes over the subcontinent including the northern Indian Ocean to quantify the net carbon balance. All natural and anthropogenic carbon sources and sinks will be estimated with pathways to net zero fully established by 2047. The net irreducible amount that needs to be captured and sequestered will be estimated as well. In-house innovations will be ready by then along with some international collaborations to accomplish net zero by 2070 or before.
Sector-specific elements in earth system predictions & projections
ESM will be completely integrated with all land uses including lakes, crops, water and air quality, fisheries, health, ecohydrology, terrestrial and marine ecosystems from lower to upper trophic levels, and so on. The detailed strategy will evolve as to whether a high-resolution global ESM will be routinely in operation, or a dynamic downscaling approach will be taken.
The last-mile decision-scale information in space and time will be based on data-driven models and AI/ML that will be supported by a state-of-the-art observational system. Such a system will include land-, air-, and space-based technologies whose innovations will be driven by synergistic inter-ministerial funding and networked science, technology, and social science institutions. Data here will include socioeconomic and health data to bring the One Health concept that will minimise vulnerabilities, exposures, and risks. Mitigation actions within the country and with international collaborations will drive minimisation of climate hazards and disaster management, preparedness, impact and risk mitigation, as well as disaster recovery. India will be the regional leader in making the entire subcontinent safe and weather-ready. India will also lead the efforts on climate resilience in the region and offer its technological know-how, expertise, and the ESM digital twin to track, manage, and minimise climate impacts.
Smart green buildings & cities
The global economy is rapidly moving towards urbanisation, which is even more true for India, given the extreme and growing climate exposures of rural economies with the majority of the labour force still engaged in agriculture. Urbanisation offers a pathway to the youth moving to education and jobs in sectors such as the information economy, IT, entertainment, sports, and the service economy in general. While urbanisation provides this pathway, India must be ready to handle the sustainability of rapid urbanisation while preventing the outgrowth of slums, water shortages, air and water pollution, and heat stress. The latter will only worsen with global warming, demanding immediate adaptation measures to cope with growing climate risks.
The urbanisation pathway must be driven by full connectivity for real-time decision support to maximise climate adaptation and mitigation while maintaining a rapid path towards net zero by 2070 or before. Innovations in smart green buildings and infrastructure will involve massive amounts of data collection and sharing for implementing actions such as automated controls for energy conservation and usage, the water-energy nexus, managing emissions, minimising environmental footprints, green and smart transportation, and smart green buildings and neighbourhoods. Innovations in food security will require vertical agriculture, space-based data collection and analysis for smart agriculture, minimisation of food, water, and energy wastage, circular economy, and more.
Climate-smart agriculture, water, energy
Climate-smart agriculture is well underway, with the doubling of farmers’ incomes as the primary goal. Agriculture is the backbone of the economy. By 2047, it will be managed with rapid advances in genomics, molecular biology, geoinformatics, autonomous agriculture machinery, smart irrigation, integrated disease management, and more. Integration of crops, livestock, and fisheries must be maximised to enhance sustainability and minimise greenhouse gas emissions while avoiding ecosystem destruction.
Climate-smart agriculture will be robustly connected to the Blue Economy, which is expected to generate one trillion dollars for the Indian economy by 2047. This will involve blue foods for nutrition and food security, blue medicines, and a massive role of desalination in producing clean drinking water. Climate-smart agriculture will ensure minimising food, water, and energy waste and manage the food-water-energy nexus synergistically.
Water security is key to national security, and water-smart and climate-smart agriculture will involve smart irrigation, maximising green water use, while managing grey and black water by advanced biotechnological innovations. Water conservation will include nature-based solutions and managed aquifer recharge. A whole suite of biotechnologies is expected to drive the circular economy by 2047.
Water security also involves smart management of the Himalayas, the third pole. The glacier and snowpack melting is rapid, but India’s strategy must include turning these rapid flows into an advantage while anticipating water availability declines later this century. This involves maximising water storage and recharge. Managing floods and water-borne diseases is also crucial. Mountain agriculture must be managed to maintain livelihoods and prevent migration.
Health and well-being, including mental health, will be key indicators of smart and sustainable agriculture, water, and energy management. Health will be tracked by socioeconomic and health data to ensure the robustness of the Earth System Predictions and Projections for health outcomes.
Energy security is the backbone of national security. Solar, wind, and hydrogen will be key pillars of the energy pathway to Net Zero. Massive battery storage innovations are already well underway. Replacing coal and other fossil fuels and providing sufficient energy at all times and locations for the burgeoning economy will ensure the rapid pathway to sustainability with minimal environmental footprint.
By 2047, India will be free of smog and air pollution. The health impacts of air pollution will be well managed, with clean energy options to ensure minimal air and water pollution, maximum recycling and conservation, and equitable access to clean water and clean air. The transport sector will also be managed by electric vehicles and renewable energy to keep the country moving safely and sustainably on the Net Zero pathway. The role of the private sector in energy, agriculture, water, and health cannot be overemphasised. Their investment in social responsibility will also ensure equitable growth for all sectors of society.
Circular economy for future
As one of the oldest civilisations, India has always valued the use and reuse of resources. The ancient wisdom of the circular economy will see India manage the circularity of all resources with innovative biotechnologies that will drive biofuel, bioenergy, water and soil clean-up, minimisation of environmental footprints, and overall food, water, and energy security. The circular economy will ensure that the sustainability pathway will be well protected from any large deviations from environmental or climate impacts.
India has already established itself as a climate leader. Its commitment to the Paris Agreement and the development and implementation of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) is a testament to this. India must continue to lead by example, driving international collaborations, sharing technological innovations, and providing disaster management assistance to neighbouring countries and beyond.
The vision for 2047 includes a fully networked governance system where all ministries, academic institutions, and the private sector work synergistically to ensure that India remains on the pathway to sustainability. The data-driven decision support systems, powered by the Earth System Model, will provide the necessary tools to manage climate risks, minimise impacts, and ensure rapid recovery to a resilient and sustainable future.
India’s march towards Net Zero by 2070 will be a journey of innovation, collaboration, and resilience. The Vision India@2047 will not only prepare the country for climate challenges but will also set a benchmark for sustainable development and climate leadership globally.
Raghu Murtugudde, Centre for Climate Studies, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India; University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, US.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.
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