India Climate and Development Partners Meet

Recognizing that the complexity of climate change requires strong collaboration with diverse public and private stakeholders, civil society and citizens, the first edition of the India Climate and Development Partners’ Meet, co-organized by the Government of Kerala and the World Bank, marked a significant milestone in their four-year old partnership under the Rebuilding Kerala Initiative. Post the 2018 floods in Kerala, a programmatic series of Bank-financed interventions have led to systemic resilience building in the state. The Partners’ Meet in Kerala highlighted the outcomes of the partnership and facilitated dialogue amongst representatives from national and subnational governments to leaders in climate action, private sector, and civil society.

• 10 sessions with participation from senior members of the central government and the state government of Kerala, including the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Kerala, Chief Secretary and Additional Chief Secretaries of the state, CEO of Niti Aayog, Secretary, DEA (Dept. of Economic Affairs), Secretary, MoEFCC (Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change), heads of multilateral institutions and community-based organizations, in addition to several others. Two World Bank reports, ‘Climate Investment Opportunities in India's Cooling Sector’ and ‘Catalogue of Best Practices for Building Flood Resilience’ released at the event.
• Government of Kerala launched the Kerala State Action Plan on Climate Change 2.0 to bolster Kerala’s commitment towards climate informed development. The Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, also announced Kerala’s goal to become a 100% renewable energy-based state by 2040 and net carbon neutral by 2050, 20 years ahead of India’s goal to become net-zero by 2070.

• It highlighted the transformative Rebuilding Kerala Initiative (RKI), emphasizing the impact of subnational and local leadership in climate action. The RKI not only focused on reconstruction but also influenced systemic changes, allocating 26% of Kerala's budget to local governance. The active involvement of women through organizations like Kudumbshree in village councils became a key asset for disaster management and resilience planning.
• The need for better collaboration and data sharing in climate information services in South Asia, particularly on river basins and city-level heat stress, was underscored. Discussions were held around how World Bank could further support climate adaptation projects through innovative approaches, emphasizing the importance of case studies and success stories. The meeting aimed to spread lessons from the Kerala model to other Indian states and the South Asia region, fostering an annual strategic forum for cross-learning and collaboration.
• The Meet achieved its goal of fostering cross-stakeholder learning with participation from six state governments as well as a cross-section of youth leaders working in areas of climate resilience and adaptations.

Youth Leadership for Climate Action Session

From catastrophic storms and severe droughts to increasing global temperatures and rising sea- levels, the way our planet is changing is not for the better. Vulnerable and marginalized communities in the global south face even greater challenges due to inadequate service delivery and existing resource stress. The current moment presents an opportunity for young people as ambassadors of climate action, to drive transformative changes on the ground and help strengthen the ability of businesses and governments to deal with impacts of climate change through increased cooperation and dialogue. This session featured a discussion with youth leaders addressing climate challenges in varied capacities and from varied sectors. It aimed identify and articulate experiences, best practice models including specifically the role of youth to ensure coherence and mutual reinforcement towards India’s updated NDCs, LiFE movement (Lifestyle for Environment) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Session 1: National and subnational leadership for inclusive and resilient growth

Many Indian states have shown leadership to mainstream resilience and accelerate low-carbon growth. Many of them are also in the process of updating their SAPCCs. It is imperative that a more decentralized, bottom-up climate policy making, resulting in actions customized to local contexts and needs, drives the states’ response to climate change. Going forward, it is important for the states to not just provide focused financing to drive climate action but put in place strong mechanisms to empower local bodies, implement pilot models that can be scaled across states and ensure scarce resources are more efficiently allocated within each sector and between sectors. States are laying a roadmap for climate leadership, but it is important to note that the diversity between states is vast and so are their needs and capacities. The session focused on important lessons being learned at the subnational level that can drive more ambitious and innovative responses to climate change.

Ministerial Session - The Ministerial Session featured addresses from senior national, state government leaders and the World Bank.

Session 2: Reinvigorated role and priorities of a ‘leveraging bank’

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for the world, a challenge affecting development gains of past decades, worsening poverty, and multifaceted inequalities. In response, the Bank has raised its ambition and commitments by increasing its climate finance target to 35% of total commitments over the 2021-2025 time period — as indicated in the Climate Change Action Plan — for impactful and scalable projects and programs that help reduce GHG emissions, foster adaptation, and improve resilience while improving development outcomes and enabling private sector. The session focused on the critical role the Bank plays in integrating climate and development priorities and pathways for leveraging the Bank to implement impactful solutions at national and subnational levels. The outcome of the session was to identify evolving priorities for leveraging the Bank as an enabler and supporter of climate action.

Session 3: Key Takeaways from COP27

COP27 held at Sharm El-Sheikh this year witnessed important steps towards greater action and engagement. Recognition of rising climate vulnerabilities and the urgency to meet the 1.5-degree target, underpinned all negotiations and the resultant outcomes from this landmark COP. Called the ‘COP of Implementation’, COP27 witnessed the historic setting up of the Loss and Damage Fund and greater support towards just transitions for low-carbon development pathways but fell short on the commitments towards long-term climate finance. India released its Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategy outlining the roadmap to reduce emissions and increase resilience across key critical sectors for the Indian economy. As a debrief, this session will systematically unbundle the developments at COP27 while gauging the importance of landmark outcomes and placing them in the context of their implication for subnational action, sectoral transitions, key areas for mobilizing climate finance and industry implications. This session was specifically designed to lay the foundation of further engagement and discussions among officials from states and stakeholders. The discussion entailed setting up of the Loss and Damage Fund and its implications for India, the Long-term Low-carbon development strategy released by and its subnational and sectoral implications, operationalization of Article 6 and channels of mobilizing scalable international finance to meet India’s ambition, and the way forward for adaptation and resilience building alongside mitigation action.

Session 4: Operationalizing community-level climate resilience in India

Community-based initiatives are emerging as promising approaches to lessen the impacts of climate change while empowering people and bolstering community resilience. These approaches have been applied to a wide range of climate adaptation programs in climate-vulnerable communities—from disaster risk reduction (DRR), emergency preparedness, and flood/drought protection to sustainable agriculture, water resource management, food security, and resilient livelihood solutions. Community-based approaches with direct engagement of the vulnerable population that are adequately supported by international agencies, national and local governments, academics, experts, and non-profit organizations have the potential to develop locally relevant, culturally appropriate, and sustainable solutions. This interactive session focused on highlighting various community-based resilience and capacity-building initiatives that have enabled the empowerment of stakeholders to manage the risks posed by a changing climate to lives and livelihoods.

 Nudging for Change: Role citizens can play in India’s fight against climate change

- In conversation with Ms. Dia Mirza, Goodwill Ambassador-India, United Nations Environment Programme

While governments, businesses and large organizations certainly must implement ambitious changes to their current approach to climate action, citizens lie at the heart of true societal transformations. The importance of individual actions is often overlooked in climate conversation. It is essential to directly involve citizens and communities in contributing to climate action and protecting the environment, thereby encouraging them to nudge their behaviour, reducing their carbon and environmental footprint and taking action at the individual and collective level. This would lead to a more sustainable lifestyle and relationship to the environment, by promoting biodiversity protection, nature-based solutions for climate resilience, sustainable energy consumption, waste management, etc. Recognizing the fact that tackling climate change requires both, concerted government action as well as conscious and informed individual action, India has recently launched mission LiFE (lifestyle for Environment) to focus on greener consumption and investment choices with an emphasis on behavioural changes. Building on the above conviction, this session featured conversation with Ms. Dia Mirza, National Goodwill Ambassador, United Nations Environment Programme and Mr Abhas Jha, Practice Manager, SSACD, The World Bank. This session explored how behavioural and consumption changes by citizens will play a role in India’s fight against climate change while also supporting LiFE mission.

Session 1: Building people-centric climate information and weather services

India is highly prone to cyclones, monsoon rainfall variability associated extreme events, and other severe weather events, causing major societal impacts. In the past two decades, 3 out of 5 Indians- more than 1.2 billion people- have been affected by at least one weather-related disaster. The social and economic costs of such hazards have been staggering. Between 1990 and 2020, a total of 1408 natural disasters have been reported in India, which affected over 1.8 billion people and led to 541,245 deaths and close to US$ 213 billion in damages. Strengthening hydro-meteorological services and associated institutions and facilitating regional cooperation initiatives will serve to inform and reinforce investments for climate resilience and contribute significantly to human safety, security and economic well-being. This session brought together key stakeholders, including central agencies like the Ministry of Earth Sciences and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), state agencies like the State Disaster Management Authorities, and meteorological research agencies, to improve impact-based forecasting and end-to- end information dissemination and to encourage accurate and timely warnings to vulnerable communities. This discussion came in timely as India took G20 presidency in December 2023 to showcase the innovative, proven best practices that are designed around user-needs and demands in the climate/early warning information value chain and economic rationale for investing in people-centric climate information and weather services.

Session 2: Bolstering multi-lateral action towards climate resilience

With the scale of the climate challenge and the vulnerabilities at the subnational level in India, the range of work to be done is wide and deep as well. Several bilateral and multilateral partners, in addition to the World Bank, have undertaken subnational and cross-sectoral programs aiming to enhance adaptative capacities and climate resilience. State-level projects undertaken by these entities in the form of infrastructural development, technical assistance, capacity building, or leveraging shared knowledge are sometimes enabled through collaborative design or through stand-alone operations which often become lighthouse projects serving as best practices for other regions. With several of these agencies working not only across similar thematic areas but also in the same regions,the nature of the challenges faced is also similar. With an intention to share best practices for building climate resilience and shared experiences and enablers for states to scale such actions, this session was designed to engage with leading bilateral and multilateral development agencies working closely to strengthen the landscape of climate action across Indian states.

Session 3: Promoting thermal comfort through climate-smart investments

Severe heat waves, responsible for thousands of deaths across India over the last few decades, are increasing with alarming frequency. The country is experiencing higher temperatures that arrive earlier and stay far longer. On this backdrop, access to cooling is about more than just comfort, it is also a glaring development challenge impacting economic productivity, food and health security. In preparing one of the first-ever comprehensive cooling action country plans, the Government of India has signaled a mature understanding of the challenge. To realize the transformational benefits of this action plan, it is important to make climate-smart investments and guide the available financing in the right direction. The session will host a panel of high-level industry, policy and civil society representatives that have distinguished experience and knowledge of climate-positive cooling solutions. Through comprehensive discussions, the session attempted to understand the underlying challenges faced by the cooling sector, with a focus on identifying solutions and next steps to leverage finance to boost uptake of sustainable cooling across sectors.