Policy Responses: International Agreements and India's Environmental Framework

Having established why environmental degradation occurs, and how it can be measured, this final section of the chapter surveys how governments — internationally and within India — have responded through law, diplomacy and economic policy.

Major international responses

• Stockholm Conference, 1972 — the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, was the first major global gathering to formally recognise the link between economic development and environmental protection, and it led many countries, including India, to set up dedicated environmental ministries and agencies in the years that followed.
• Rio Earth Summit, 1992 — the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro adopted the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 (a detailed action plan for sustainable development) and opened for signature two landmark treaties: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity.
• Kyoto Protocol, 1997 — adopted under the UNFCCC, it set binding greenhouse-gas emission-reduction targets for industrialised (developed) countries, based on the principle that developed nations, having contributed the bulk of historical emissions, should bear the first binding obligations.
• Paris Agreement, 2015 — moved to a more universal approach, under which every signatory country (developed and developing alike) submits its own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) toward a shared global goal of limiting the rise in average world temperature, reviewed and strengthened periodically.

India's domestic legal and institutional framework

India's environmental legislation developed steadily from the 1970s onward, closely following the global attention sparked by the Stockholm Conference and, later, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984:

• The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974 and the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 created Pollution Control Boards at the central and state level (including the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board) with powers to set and enforce quality standards.
• The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 is the umbrella legislation enacted in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster, giving the central government wide powers to set standards, restrict industrial location, and regulate hazardous substances across all forms of environmental harm.
• The Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 and the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 protect forest land from unauthorised diversion and protect endangered species and their habitats respectively.
• The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 established a specialised judicial body — the National Green Tribunal — for the speedy resolution of environmental disputes and enforcement of environmental law, outside the ordinary and often slower civil court system.

Economic (market-based) instruments

Alongside command-and-control regulation (standards, permits, bans), governments increasingly use market-based instruments that work through the price mechanism to internalise the externality described earlier in this chapter:

• Pigouvian (pollution) taxes — a tax set equal to the marginal external cost of an activity, so that the polluter's private cost of production rises to match the true social cost, giving a direct financial incentive to reduce pollution.
• Tradable emission permits (cap-and-trade) — regulators fix a total allowable quota of a pollutant and issue permits up to that quota; firms that can cut emissions cheaply sell their surplus permits to firms for whom cutting emissions is costlier, so the overall reduction target is met at the lowest total cost to the economy.
• Subsidies for clean technology and renewable energy — lowering the cost of solar, wind and other clean-energy investment relative to fossil-fuel alternatives, to steer new capacity toward less-polluting sources.
• Deposit-refund and extended producer-responsibility schemes — used increasingly for plastic packaging and electronic waste, requiring producers to bear the cost of eventual collection and safe disposal.

India's climate policy and the Andhra Pradesh context …