PNNL

Abstract

India faces a dual challenge of climate change and economic development. Although India’s per capita emissions are well below global average, the country is already one of the world’s largest carbon polluters. Since the Paris Agreement’s ratification, Indian policymakers and stakeholders have increasingly required high-quality research to assess ambitious carbon mitigation options. An important place where policymakers look for research-based evidence is the peer-reviewed literature. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent peer-reviewed literature on India's 2030 and 2050 pathways. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify key quantitative national modeling studies with sectoral detail. From the 35 studies identified, we synthesized scenario data to draw common conclusions and identify critical research gaps. The main focus was on examining the coverage and the state of information available on low-carbon pathways. The results of our analysis showcase several conclusions for India’s low-carbon futures and highlight research gaps that require further examination. Overall, there are limited studies investigating deep decarbonization pathways for India at both national and sectoral level (specifically in industry and buildings). In addition, there are gaps in technologies covered across studies and sectors, for example, hydrogen in industry. The existing low-carbon pathways indicate that achieving emission reductions (below 2 GtCO2) by mid-century would necessitate significant transformations of the Indian energy sector, such as, decrease in unabated coal power capacity, transportation modal shift, and industrial process switching. Lastly, there were substantial differences observed in the final energy estimates reported across studies (mainly in transportation). Since many studies did not consistently report their model drivers (e.g., floorspace, vehicle kilometers travelled etc.) and outputs (e.g., energy by fuel, emissions by sector etc.), it was challenging to understand the model variations. Future research efforts are needed, that support existing low-carbon research, while working towards inter-modal consistency.