Icons made by Freepik from http://www.flaticon.com The German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, Heiko Maas, recently released the ‘Policy guidelines for the Indo-Pacific’ (hereinafter the “Indo-Pacific Policy”). The 72-page document is available here. The Indo-Pacific Policy is intended to identify areas for cooperation between Germany and partner countries in the Indo-Pacific region (which is defined […]
This blog was written as part of my ongoing project on plastic waste as a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Packaging waste management in Germany takes place through a “dual system”, where the producers of waste participate in a system where they contract with a private waste management system […]
It is not uncommon these days to come across tweets citing slick World Economic Forum videos showcasing new developments in the field of solar and wind energy, with exhortations like “We have the solutions. Let’s implement them.” In the narrative on climate change (or climate crisis, as it is more accurately being referred to of […]
Reecntly Lekha Sridhar and I wrote in The Wire about a recent amendment to the Basel Convention which will change the standard for plastic waste export by developed countries to developing countries, now requiring prior informed consent from the developing country. We examine the genesis of the Basel Convention, what this development means for the […]
An article I co-authored with Bharath Jairaj in the Jindal Global Law Review on India’s energy transition titled ‘An assessment of India’s energy transition: Paris and beyond’ is available here. The abstract is set out below. Abstract Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, climate change has gained greater prominence as a topic […]
An article I co-authored with Abhayraj Naik on re-evaluating India’s climate policy has been published by Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) in their ‘Engage’ section, and can be accessed on the EPW website here. The abstract of the article is set out below: “India’s domestic climate policy is outdated and relies on a disjointed institutional […]
I wrote recently with Bharath Jairaj in Firstpost about why the Ministry of Power’s proposal to classify energy from large hydropower projects as “renewable energy” is ill-conceived and flawed. While India should remain strong in its commitment to de-carbonization through expanding its installed capacity for renewable energy, shifting the goalposts to re-define the concept of […]
The end of the holiday season is a good time to contemplate about food excesses, and wasteful consumption. In the year 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that one-third of all the food produced in the world for human consumption failed to reach a consumer. Food wasted on such an enormous scale, apart […]
With increasing awareness about anthropogenic climate change, there is a shift towards accounting for the true social cost of all our actions. The way we locomote, eat, and use our electrical appliances all entail a carbon footprint. So what about the externalities imposed by the annual event aimed at finding solutions on how to minimize […]
The previous post about solutions for risk mitigation in the renewable energy sector briefly touched upon the possibility of using the Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM), which has been used in the road sector in India. This post will examine this theme in some more detail. The renewable energy power plant model entails high capital costs […]
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