Narendra Modi  

The biggest development on tackling climate change since the Paris Accord of 2015 has been the International Solar Alliance, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the inaugural session of the World Sustainable Development Summit. “India and France initiated the International Solar Alliance.

It already has 121 members [countries] and is perhaps the single most important global achievement since the Paris Agreement of 2015,” he told a crowd of students, Ministers and delegates from 40 countries.

“While the world was discussing Inconvenient Truth [a reference to the 2006 documentary on global warming] we translated it into Convenient Action,” he added. The International Solar Alliance (ISA) that aims at increasing solar energy deployment in member countries, came into legal, independent existence in December and is the first treaty-based international intergovernmental organisation to be based out of India.

The ISA aims to mobilise more than $1,000 billion in investments by 2030 for “massive deployment” of solar energy, pave the way for future technologies adapted to the needs of moving to a fossil-free future and keep global temperatures from rising above 2°C by the end of the century.

India’s target

India has committed itself to having 175,000 MW of renewed energy in the grid by 2022.

As part of the agreement, India will contribute $27 million (Rs. 175.5 crore approximately) to the ISA for creating corpus, building infrastructure and recurring expenditure over five years from 2016-17 to 2020-21.

The ISA was launched on November 30, 2015 in Paris, on the sidelines of COP-21, the UN climate conference.