Climate change mitigation involves strategies aimed at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting renewable energy sources, improving energy efficiency, and implementing sustainable practices. CSTEP focuses on building models to simulate India's future across sectors, such as transport, industries, buildings, agriculture, and forestry, to find interventions required to achieve a sustainable and secure future. Our work also involves the study of certain themes that cut across sectors (quality of life and development vs climate action, water and land demands for agriculture vs power, etc).
CSTEP's SAFARI model: Balancing development with climate action requires a good understanding of the interactions between sectors, natural resource systems, and environmental externalities. The Climate Change Mitigation at CSTEP has undertaken a modelling study with the aim to provide such an understanding and help create scenarios for low-carbon development through the use of an interactive simulation tool called Sustainable Alternative Futures for India (SAFARI). You can access the tool here.
SAFARI estimates the energy, emissions, and resources implications of achieving developmental goals such as food, housing, healthcare, education, power for all, and transport up to 2050. The user interface allows you to explore these implications as well as the trade-offs between them. Using SAFARI, you can create integrated scenarios across sectors and test out the impact of policy choices on energy, emissions, and resources. Ultimately, we hope that this tool can be used to provide insights into developing and tracking India's long-term strategy (LTS) in line with the Paris Agreement. For more information, please contact safari@cstep.in
Can the 2025 union budget be a catalyst for offshore wind?
The Indian government has made commendable strides in promoting renewable energy (RE), including setting an ambitious target to auction 37 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030. Offshore wind—a stable and reliable RE source—holds immense promise for diversifying India’s energy mix. However, achieving this goal will require significant financial and policy support. The upcoming Union Budget 2025 is an opportunity for the government to allocate additional funding and address key challenges to unlock the sector’s potential in India.
Empowering the youth to transform the urban landscape through systems thinking
Urbanisation is reshaping human settlements at an unprecedented pace, creating a complex interplay of identities, cultural practices, resources, and values within urban spaces. As India progresses towards becoming a developed nation, it is vital to ensure that every citizen enjoys a dignified life amidst this transformation. Currently, Indian
Balancing energy transition: Assessing decent living standards and future energy demand in the Global South
Achieving low energy demand in buildings is crucial in climate change mitigation. In the Global South, however, reducing the energy demand blanketly is not advisable due to critical gaps in access to the basic services supporting Decent Living Standards (DLS). Current energy demand scenarios mostly overlook achievement of DLS. Furthermore, model limitations in representing distributional aspects hinder modelling future energy demands to meet DLS.
Swamped with Potential: Wetlands for Mitigation and Adaptation
World Wetlands Day is celebrated on 2 February every year and underscores the need to save and restore wetlands and raise awareness about their crucial role. Wetlands are some of the planet’s most powerful yet underappreciated ecosystems. These ecosystems where water saturates the land, including mangroves, peat lands, marshes, swamps, and coral reefs, provide a wealth of benefits. They act as habitats for diverse plants and animals, protect shores from waves, reduce the impacts of floods, and even support local livelihoods.
Senior Associate (Mitigation/Air Quality)
The Senior Associate will be involved in developing models to project India’s future energy demand and emissions, as well as air quality and pollutant exposure, so, a multi-disciplinary modelling background is essential.
No. of Vacancies
2
Responsibilities
Climate finance and the Global South: Negotiating a fair future at COP29
At the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP29), India voiced its disappointment at the climate finance announcement of $300 billion annually under the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), and rightly so. This goal was
Local action amidst global inertia
After hours of intense negotiations, the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended with a climate finance goal where developed countries are to provide $300 billion annually by 2035. However, this is far from what the developing countries need, and once again brings global climate gridlock into the spotlight.
Why forests matter in climate finance discussions
COP29, the conference touted as the "finance COP," concluded recently in Baku and has shown promise and oversight in its treatment of nature within the climate agenda. The latest estimate of required financing stands at a staggering $1.3 trillion, a sharp contrast to the mere $300 billion pledged under the New Collective Quantitative Goal (NCQG), which remains contentious among many parties, especially the Global South. Moreover, the need, and therefore the estimates, keep increasing year-on-year with minimal mobilisation towards achieving these goals.