A Just energy transition: Looking beyond the obvious
Source: The Economic Times
With COP27, it is once again that time of year when new collaborations and alliances are formed to tackle climate change.
Amit Kumar, Senior Fellow at WRI India expresses the following issue over implementing an equitable and just energy transition:
The Just Energy Transition Collaboration (JETP), a partnership that aims to quicken India’s shift away from coal, has received encouragement from the G7 countries. The term “just” is certainly an important one as it is the civilians, which are the first one to bear the harshness of climate change.
India currently lacks a formal framework to unite all the factors relating to the energy transition under a single heading. Since the existing debate on just transition is mostly based on communities and economies built around coal mining alone, such a framework must approach just energy transition holistically.
The impact of the energy shift on relatively smaller sectors like MSMEs is another crucial topic of discussion. The pertinent question is whether they would be abandoned to suffer in the absence of administrative assistance.
The discussions regarding just transition, the activity of creating road maps, planning, and subsequent execution must also go closer to the ground; precisely at the levels where impacts will be. Additionally, it means that local employees, communities, civil society organisations, and institutions of local government must be much more actively involved throughout time.
To read the full article, Click here.
