India GHG Emissions Breakup by Sectors
Year: 2023; Total: 3.4 billion tons
How are India’s GHG emissions split between various sectors – Industrial, Agricultural, Residential?
Here’s the split, based on my calculations and estimates:
- Industrial & commercial activities: 1.7 billion tons (50%)
- Agri & livestock: 0.7 billion tons (20%)
- Residential activities: 0.4 billion tons (12%)
- Transport: 0.3 billion tons (9%)
- Others (land use change, emissions from landfill and industrial waste, fugitive emissions): 0.3 (9%)
While the top most will not surprise anyone – we all see smoke emerging from so many industries – agriculture and livestock contributing 20% to total emissions is not something many would have expected. We all tend to look at agricultural as “natural”, where there is not a lot of CO2 emitted – and we are actually right about it. A good portion of the agri & livestock emissions are not from enegry-related CO2 emissions, but from other activities unique to this sector – enteric fermentation in cattle that result in methane emissions in their burbs, N2O emissions from fertilizer over use (remember, fertilizer is all about nitrogen), methane emissions from crops under water and also from animal waste…
The fact that India has one of the largest amount of agricultural activities and is the country with the highest number of cattle only exacerbates the above.
Any decarbonization startegy has to thus give non industrial sectors – especially agriculture – a serious look and explore ways to reduce emissions from this.
If you have queries on this, please send a note to narsi@eai.in and I will try my best to help! – Narsi, EAI
Support sources, references & other highlights
An analysis of GHG emissions in India – Shakti Foundation – an oldish one (2007-12), but gives a good indication of the break-ups and proportions between various sectors, some of which might not have changed much (proportions, that is) in a decade.
