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RENEWABLE BAZAAR
MARKET REPORT
MARCH 2011
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India has 150GW of renewable energy potential, about half in the form of small hydropower, biomass, and wind and half in solar, cogeneration, and waste-to-energy. Developing renewable energy can help India increase its energy security, reduce the adverse impacts on the local environment, lower its carbon intensity, contribute to more balanced regional development, and realize its aspirations for leadership in high-technology industries. Since 2005 the energy and climate change agenda has taken center stage in the domestic and international policy arena. India is well placed to build on this momentum. It has tripled its renewable energy generation capacity in the past five years (figure 1), now ranking fifth in the world in total installed renewable energy capacity, and it has established a legal and regulatory framework for sector oversight. The government has set ambitious targets. It aims to increase the capacity to generate renewable energy by 40GW to 55GW by the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2022). The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) has set the even more ambitious goal of a 1 percent annual increase in renewable energy generation which stands at about 3.5 percent in 2008. Meeting this goal may require 40–80GW of additional capacity in renewable energy capacity by 2017, depending on India’s demand for power and plant capacity. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) has set its own ambitious target of adding 1GW of capacity between 2010 and 2013. It seeks to increase combined solar capacity from 9MW in 2010 to 20GW by 2022. To achieve these goals, India needs an order-of-magnitude increase in renewable energy growth in the next decade. To add 40GW by 2022, India will have to meet the ambitious target of the JNNSM, double its wind capacity, quadruple its small hydropower power capacity, fully realize co-generation capacity, and increase biomass realization by a factor of five to six. These ambitious targets have made creation of an enabling environment for renewable energy development particularly urgent and topical.
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Climate Adaptation: Can Developing Countries Prepare for a Hotter Tomorrow? By Manish Bapna and Kelly Levin
Over the past year, the world has witnessed weather events on four continents so extreme that they stretch the limits of modern human experience. Last summer’s flooding in Pakistan inundated one fifth of the country and affected 20 million people. The record Moscow heat wave led to more than 10,000 deaths, widespread peat bog and forest fires, and the loss of a third of Russia’s grain crop, driving up food prices worldwide. 2011 has already witnessed flooding in Eastern Australia that submerged an area the size of France and Germany combined, followed by the most powerful cyclone to hit the country in almost a century. In Brazil, New Year floods combined with mudslides triggered the nation’s deadliest natural disaster on record.
Flooding in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo credit: flickr/Sumaiya Ahmed
As well as urgently cutting emissions, nations everywhere need to take steps to adapt to a very different world.
Visit the World Resources Report website for more information on decision-making in a changing climate.
It is too early to tell whether these extreme events are directly caused by humaninduced climate change. What is not in dispute is that they are consistent with the broad scientific consensus that links a changing climate with more extreme events and more severe climatic cycles. Equally indisputably, the world is quickly moving towards a much hotter tomorrow. Global average surface temperature in 2010 tied as the warmest on record. According to NOAA, it also took the honors as the wettest year since records began; a development in line with models that predict that warmer temperatures will increase precipitation. The world has witnessed 0.8˚C (1.5˚F) of warming since 1880, resulting already in significant changes to physical, hydrological and ecological systems. Yet manmade climate change has barely begun to bite. According to a recent UNEP assessment, by 2100, the world can expect global average temperature rises between 2.5˚C and 5˚C (4.5˚F-9˚F) over pre-industrial levels even if all the greenhouse gas emissions cuts pledged by countries in the UN climate negotiations are fulfilled. If these pledges are not honored, warming will be even greater.
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The message for governments is clear. As well as urgently cutting emissions, nations everywhere need to take steps to adapt to a very different world. Such steps will require a fundamental shift in how most governments currently plan for climate-related impacts. Not only must we improve our ability to react to extreme weather events, and other climate-related surprises. Just as important, we must proactively prepare countries for new variations in local climate (such as altered monsoon patterns) and longterm changes (such as sea level rise) the combined impacts of which could affect vast populations. It is imperative that governments start now to incorporate climate risks into plans and policies in sectors such as urban development, coastal planning, agriculture, water and forestry management, and electricity production. If they don’t, major investments by governments and donors may be wasted or quickly become obsolete. And the world’s most vulnerable and resource-poor societies will miss critical opportunities to become more climate-resilient. In Pakistan, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development investments were swept away in the floodwaters. So how specifically should planners and policy makers go about incorporating climate
risks into their decisions? Human society historically has not been good at forwardlooking, proactive decision making. We are slow to react to, learn from, and foresee change.
While natural disasters grab the headlines, some countries are pioneering ways to plan for both short- and long-term climate risks.
Yet encouragingly, while natural disasters grab the headlines, below the radar some countries are pioneering ways to plan for both short- and long-term climate risks. Over the past year, the World Resources Report, produced by the World Resources Institute with the UN Development Programme, UN Environment Programme, and the World Bank, has engaged leaders in developing countries to learn about such efforts. Important lessons are emerging, with governments using innovative policies and pilot projects to learn which interventions can effectively address different climate risks and how to catalyze such action.
Bangladesh has begun to move from disaster relief to disaster preparedness, developing pioneering early warning systems. When Cyclone SIDR battered Bangladesh in 2007, these helped keep the death toll to about 3,400 people, compared with an estimated 140,000 who perished in a
1991 cyclone of similar magnitude. Vietnam is investing more than US$100m in mangrove restoration to protect coastal towns in anticipation of climateinduced flooding. Stateowned plantations have been coupled with new schools, health clinics and roads, as well as forest leases for villagers, to promote acceptance. In drought-plagued Mali, the national meteorological service transmits seasonal rainfall and soil moisture data to farmers teaching them to interpret the information to manage their crops, with yields and incomes rising in pilot areas.
It is no accident that these initiatives are taking root in poor countries with the most to lose from the many impacts climate change will throw at humanity. Indeed, the developing world, out of necessity, may lead the way in learning to live with a warming planet.
Manish Bapna, Executive Vice President & Managing Director Manish Bapna joined WRI as its executive vice president and managing director in June 2007. mbapna@wri.org+1 (202) 729-7688
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