---
title: "Climate Change & India's Global Commitments Guide"
description: "Cover climate science fundamentals, the UNFCCC-Kyoto-Paris architecture, and India's NDCs, NAPCC missions and net-zero pledge for UPSC Prelims and Mains GS-3."
url: "https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/lessons/upsc-environment-ecology-climate-change-india-s-commitments"
---

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Climate change & India's commitments

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# Climate change & India's commitments

Climate science fundamentals, the UNFCCC-Kyoto-Paris architecture, and India's NDCs, NAPCC missions, and net-zero pledge for UPSC Prelims and Mains GS-3.

## The Physical Basis

Climate change denotes long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns driven, since the Industrial Revolution, by anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The principal gases are carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O) and fluorinated gases, each weighted by Global Warming Potential (GWP) over 100 years — CH₄ is \~28–34 times and N₂O \~265–298 times CO₂. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988 by the WMO and UNEP, is the authoritative scientific body; its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021–23) concluded that human influence has unequivocally warmed the planet by about 1.1°C above 1850–1900 levels.

## The Treaty Architecture

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and entered into force in 1994, enshrining the principle of **Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC)** in Article 3. It split parties into Annex I (developed) and non-Annex I (developing, including India) groups.

The **Kyoto Protocol (1997, in force 2005)** imposed binding emission-reduction targets only on Annex I countries for the first commitment period (2008–2012), and created three flexible mechanisms: the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Joint Implementation, and Emissions Trading. The United States never ratified Kyoto; the Doha Amendment (2012) set a second period to 2020.

The **Paris Agreement**, adopted at COP21 on 12 December 2015 and in force 4 November 2016, marked a paradigm shift to universal, bottom-up commitments. Its Article 2 sets the goal of holding warming "well below 2°C" while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Article 4 obliges every party to submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), ratcheted upward every five years through a Global Stocktake (Article 14), the first of which concluded at COP28 (Dubai, 2023) with a call to "transition away from fossil fuels."

## Finance and the Latest COPs

Developed countries pledged at Copenhagen (COP15, 2009) to mobilise USD 100 billion per year by 2020 — a target met belatedly only in 2022 per the OECD. COP27 (Sharm el-Sheikh, 2022) established a **Loss and Damage Fund**, operationalised at COP28. COP29 (Baku, 2024) agreed a New Collective Quantified Goal of USD 300 billion annually by 2035, which India and the G77 criticised as inadequate. The Kigali Amendment (2016) to the Montreal Protocol — ratified by India in 2021 — phases down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), potent GWP gases, illustrating how ozone and climate regimes intersect.

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