International Initiatives on Climate

From the framework treaty to India’s latest pledge

• 1992: the UNFCCC is adopted at the Rio Earth Summit. It enters into force in 1994.
• December 2015: the Paris Agreement is adopted at COP21, by 195 Parties.
• 25 March 2026: India’s Cabinet approves its third-generation NDC (NDC 3.0), covering 2031-2035.
• 24 April 2026: India formally communicates NDC 3.0 to the UNFCCC.

A framework treaty, then a binding agreement

• The UNFCCC was adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It is a framework treaty. It set no binding targets of its own.
• The Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in December 2015. It is the first legally binding climate treaty to cover nearly all nations.
• Its goal has two parts: hold warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and also try to limit it to 1.5°C.
• NDCs are each country’s own climate plan under Paris. Countries update them every five years, each time with rising ambition. That is different from Kyoto’s fixed, top-down targets.

India’s new targets, and a growing carbon sink

• India’s NDC 3.0 (2031-2035) raises its emissions-intensity target to a 47% cut by 2035 from 2005 levels, up from the earlier 45%-by-2030 pledge. It also raises the non-fossil power capacity target to 60% by 2035.
• India had already reached about 52% non-fossil capacity by February 2026, ahead of both its earlier target and this new one.
• NDC 3.0 also targets an additional carbon sink of 3.5 to 4.0 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2035. This builds on 29 billion tonnes already achieved by 2025.

Kyoto Protocol terms, and two protocols that aren’t it

• Annex-I Countries: a Kyoto Protocol term, naming developed countries that took on binding emission-reduction targets. Not a Cartagena Protocol term.
• Clean Development Mechanism (CDM): a Kyoto Protocol tool. It lets developed countries invest in emission-reduction projects in developing countries. Projects earn Certified Emission Reductions (CERs), each equal to one tonne of CO2, from Kyoto, not the Nagoya Protocol.
• Cartagena Protocol (2000): governs biosafety and the movement of living modified organisms across borders. Unrelated to Annex-I status.
• Nagoya Protocol (2010): covers fair access to genetic resources, and fair sharing of benefits from using them. Unrelated to CERs.
• Greenhouse Gas Protocol: an international accounting tool, not a treaty. It helps governments and businesses measure and manage their own emissions, developed by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

A design choice, and a two-tiered goal

• Paris deliberately replaced Kyoto’s fixed, top-down targets with a bottom-up NDC system. Under this system, countries set their own ambition.
• That design choice made near-universal participation possible. But it also means the whole system depends on political will, not treaty enforcement.
• India’s revised NDC shows that pattern working as designed. It raised its own target after already beating the previous one early, since each five-year cycle asks over-performers to commit to more.
• The “well below 2°C, pursue 1.5°C” language is deliberately two-tiered. It sets a firm floor and an aspirational stretch goal, a compromise that let both cautious and ambitious countries sign the same text.
• For India’s own energy-transition numbers behind these targets, see EnvEco0008. For the latest COP outcome and global opinion data, see EnvEco0016.

COP28’s climate-and-health declaration, and India’s holdback

• At COP28 in Dubai, in December 2023, 123 countries signed the “COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health,” a list that later grew past 140. India did not sign it, and nor did the United States.
• The declaration is voluntary and not legally binding on any signatory. It asks countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their own health sector “swiftly, sustainably, and substantially.”
• India held back mainly over cold-chain storage. Vaccines and medicines need constant refrigeration, and a fast, binding-feeling cut to that cooling capacity risked weakening India’s own health-care resilience.
• This shows India weighing a climate commitment against health-security capacity, not signing every multilateral text by default.