Accounting for colonial rule reduces India's climate role by 15%

India's responsibility for the climate crisis is likely to be 15% lower than thought if the period of the British colonial rule is accounted for, a new analysis has found.

- Abhishek Jha and Jayashree Nandi

Previous analysis ranked India as the seventh-largest contributor to current warming (in the 1850-2021 period), behind the United States (1), China (2), Russia (3), Brazil (4), Germany (5) and Indonesia (6)-but ahead of the United Kingdom (8). But when colonial emissions and historical emissions are considered (for 1850-2023 period), the UK jumps to the fourth spot, while India remains at the seventh, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy.

Previous analysis had put India's share of cumulative historical emissions at 3.4% of the global total, including CO2 from fossil fuels, cement, land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF).

However, this drops to 2.9% of the global total, when emissions under colonial rule are assigned to the UK. Moreover, with colonial emissions from other former territories added to the UK's total, it ranks fourth in the world, with 5.1% of historical emissions - a much larger share than India's, according to the analysis.

Colonial rule and its relationship with the climate crisis and nature's degradation has been captured by author Amitav Ghosh in his works. It has also been discussed in the light of climate reparations and justice among climate activists. At the 26th edition of the climate change conference (COP26) in Glasgow, a key grouping of developing countries, which includes India and China, raised objections against some segments of the draft proposal and said those would amount to "carbon colonialism" by rich nations.

More significantly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its sixth assessment report last year identified colonialism as one of the factors driving vulnerability.