Climate policies : what if emerging country baseline were not so optimistic? - a case study related to India

One of the current main objective of international negotiations on climate change aims at enlarging the coordination regime to developing countries (DCs), and particularly to emerging countries. The international coordination system built at the Kyoto Conference relies on a coordination system based on a purely climate centric approach which shows irreconcilable contradictions between climate and development issues. This article aims at evaluatingpossible pathways implementing synergies between climate policies and development policies in order to create an incentive towards DCs to take part in climate mitigation. We focus on an illustrative example on India.When most reference scenarios postulate rapid energy decoupling of the GDP and rapid decarbonisation of DCs economies in the future, this article elaborates, with the IMACLIM-R model, a baseline taking into account weaknesses and current disequilibria of the Indian technico-economic system such as the high dependency on imported energy, or the structural shortage in electricity. We show why a purely climate centric approach (quota allocation), adopted to commit with a world objective of tabilization to 550ppm, induce very high transition costs in spite of significant financial transfers. On the contrary, a strategy based on the research of synergies between the reduction of these disequilibria, and the mitigation of GHG emissions is investigated in the power sector, which presents the biggest potential of no-regret measures. This permits to drop down transition costs applied to the Indianeconomy by improving the overall energy efficiency. An economic and environmental evaluation of this alternative scenario is lead.