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India’s rapid urbanisation underscores the need to balance growing consumption patterns, development goals, and climate commitments. The scenarios presented in this paper were created using our Sustainable Alternative Futures for India (SAFARI) model, a system dynamics model that simulates interlinkages between sectors in India and their competition for resources and energy at the national scale.

India has to overcome several developmental challenges in the coming decades. Bridging the housing shortage; improving healthcare and education infrastructure; providing 24/7 electricity, clean water, and clean cooking fuels to all; and maintaining food security are some of the challenging goals for India that are in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Government of India has also emphasised its commitment to climate action by ratifying the Paris Agreement and formulating Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets.

India is planning to install 450 GW of renewable energy (RE) generation capacity by 2030. A major share of RE comes from solar and wind energy sources. These are highly intermittent sources of energy, and the generation of power from these cannot be accurately predicted. Moreover, power from these RE sources cannot be dispatched based on real-time demand. This is where utility-scale energy storages, with the ability to manage grid-balancing issues, come in. Among these, pumped-hydro energy storage (PHES) is a mature technology.

The draft NEP, besides recognising the significance of RE hybrids (like solar-biomass, solar-hydro) for sustainable generation, highlights the role of DRE in reducing dependency on the transmission network, especially through solar rooftops in urban spaces and mini-grids in remote villages.

However, large-scale deployment of DRE systems will throw up issues related to intermittency, voltage instabilities, variable RE (VRE) curtailments, and network management.

Solar-plus-storage technology is set for a promising future in India because of rapidly rising electricity demand, ambitious solar targets, higher solar penetration, and falling prices of solar and storage technologies in the nation. As of 31 March 2021, the total power generation capacity in India is 382.15 GW, of which 234.7 GW is thermal and 94.4 GW is renewable energy (RE), with nuclear and hydro accounting for the rest.

Air pollution from the transport sector is one of the major challenges plaguing cities worldwide. Pollution from the sector is generally assumed to be from tailpipe emissions from vehicles. However, emerging evidence shows that non-exhaust emissions (NEEs) from vehicles also produce a significant quantity of tiny and toxic particulate pollutants. These pollutants can deteriorate the air quality and cause adverse health impacts.

India has initiated several schemes to promote ecosystem restoration. These include restoring 26 million hectares of degraded lands by 2030, conserving 157 wetlands, and restoring around 2,228 waterbodies. These conservation spaces have been identified using geospatial tools, which are emerging as the best bet for informed decision-making.

This year’s World Environment Day urges us to heal our ecosystems — geographic areas where organisms live in conjunction with the surrounding environment, interacting as a system (like marine-ecosystem, forests, grasslands, and wetlands)­ — through a pledge to “Reimagine. Recreate. Restore.” It also kicks off the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030).