For India, COP31 Must Turn Climate Promises Into Projects That Reach People
The COP31 Presidency's 10 priority themes are the very challenges that India is grappling with.
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India's power sector achieved a landmark in February this year, with non-fossil sources contributing to over 50 percent of installed capacity, five years ahead of the committed timeline. Yet, coal still generates more than 70 percent of India's electricity, highlighting the gap between installed capacity and the energy mix that powers everyday lives and its reach to different strata of society.
The Conference of the Parties (COP) 31 Action Agenda, launched in New York on 21 September, will be judged by how well it closes that distance between what we can count and what people experience.
The COP31 Presidency's 10 priority themes, from electrification to resilient cities, food security, health, and oceans, are the very challenges that India is grappling with.
The proposed Climate Implementation Bridge by the Presidency aims to turn national priorities into projects that investors can fund. Echoing a long-standing demand of developing countries, it treats finance, technology, and capacity building as preconditions that cut across every theme.
For India, these preconditions are not abstract. The new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for 2031–35 have already raised the emission intensity reduction target to 47 percent and the non-fossil capacity share to 60 percent by 2035, while making clear that sustaining this ambition depends on finance and technology transfer.
Competing Promises, Asymmetrical Results
At Bonn in June, India asked for these enablers: dedicated space to discuss the financial obligations of developed countries under Article 9.1, a dialogue on unilateral trade measures such as the EU's carbon border mechanism, and an operational Just Transition Mechanism.
The USD 300 billion Baku goal already fell short of need. New data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that developed countries provided and mobilised about USD 137 billion in 2024, much of it as loans, while grants remained under USD 30 billion.
For India, the monetary cost matters as much as the quantity. The need is about USD 170 billion per year through 2030, and Indian borrowers routinely pay 1– 3 percent more than those in developed countries for comparable assets.
The second imbalance is in what gets financed. A portfolio built for investors favours solar parks, transmission lines, and industrial upgrades. Watershed restoration, agroforestry, heat-resilient housing, and community health systems rarely clear a commercial hurdle as their benefits are diffuse.
Even the Agenda's Resilient Cities goal, a 25 percent cut in the energy intensity of buildings, measures energy rather than who is protected from heat.
The Global Goal on Adaptation, carried over from COP30, is a key opportunity for India to push for grants, not loans, for communities already facing climate losses, with clear resilience outcomes along with mitigation goals.
The third imbalance is in what counts as progress. The Agenda's flagship 35-by-35 pledge asks governments to raise electricity’s share of final energy use to 35 percent by 2035 but does not commit them to producing that power from clean sources. There is skepticism that new gas and coal generation could be counted as progress.
For India, that criticism misses the point. India's position since Glasgow has been to phase down unabated coal, not phase it out, and the pledge's recognition of national circumstances respects that.
Coal will anchor India's grid for years even as renewables meet a rising share of new demand. India should therefore back electrification rather than a clean-only rule, provided that the finance for storage, grids, and flexibility acknowledged in the pledge actually flows.
The fourth imbalance is between climate ambition and trade rules. Exporters from developing countries cannot be expected to decarbonise steel and cement while they face border charges that disregard their circumstances. Countries on a development trajectory need carbon space and predictable support, not a timetable blind to capacity.
Contextualising Accountability
Lastly, architecture matters too. Türkiye leads the Action Agenda and Australia the negotiations, a first in COP history. But both hosts carry credibility problems. Türkiye has no fossil-fuel phase-out plan and draws about a third of its power from coal, while Australia has fast-tracked new gas and coal projects, including one that will supply coal until 2055.
Hosts expanding fossil fuel supply are ill-positioned to press others on the pace of the transition. The two tracks must also speak to each other to ensure that what is announced on the agenda is reflected in the negotiations.
What, then, does India need from Antalya? A clear roadmap on Article 9.1 finance; a funded commitment to close the adaptation gap; an electrification pledge that respects phase-down pathways, backed by concessional finance for storage and grids; a structured dialogue on trade measures; and an equitable transition framework that recognises national circumstances.
The question negotiators should keep asking is therefore not ‘how much was pledged?’ but ‘delivered to whom, and how soon?’ In the meantime, India will continue to offer proven models in solar deployment, disaster-resilient infrastructure, and community-led land restoration that other developing countries can adopt.
(Dr Indu K Murthy heads the Climate, Environment and Sustainability sector at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), a research-based think tank. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)