India should double down on climate action for sustainable economic growth
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As I leave from New York after a week full of conversations and action points around climate change, I feel a deep sense of urgency. For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5° Celsius—not just for a week or month, but for an entire year! And 22 July 2024 went down in history as the hottest day since humans started recording temperatures 175 years ago.
We are breaching one threshold after another. This requires us to immediately shed inertia on climate action globally. We have incipient signs of the momentum that is now needed.
Renewables make up 30% of the world’s electricity supply, which is a 10-percentage-point increase from 2010. We are seeing innovations that will shape our tomorrow—in battery storage, carbon capture, green hydrogen, ocean restoration, reforestation, the use of artificial intelligence for climate forecasting, and more. In 2023, investment in clean energy was almost twice that of investment in fossil fuels, a significant feat in the context of relatively high oil and gas prices over the last few years.
Fortunately, the writing on the wall is becoming clearer for fossil fuels. The overall tone at New York was about how best to accelerate climate action to limit the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5° Celsius above the pre-Industrial Age average, and whether that is a target that still remains achievable now. We have a few tailwinds backing us.
An International Monetary Fund report released this week showed that inflation in advanced economies has largely been brought within the target ranges of their central banks. This is likely to prompt a global monetary easing cycle after the recent interest-rate cut in the US. This is good news for the
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