India: Environment

For many Indian businesses, the climate journey begins with a simple exercise: measuring their carbon footprint. But as India’s carbon market takes shape, knowing your emissions is only the starting point. A more important question then emerges: What do these numbers mean for business and what should we do next?

For listed companies, preparing the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) involves collecting data from multiple departments, consolidating performance indicators and ensuring that disclosures are complete, consistent and finalized within the reporting timeline. Companies must ensure that each disclosure is supported by reliable data, documented calculation methodologies and adequate records, with a clear basis for how the reported figures have been derived and validated. These requirements become particularly relevant as companies prepare for BRSR Core assessment or assurance.

Global warming driven by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and compounded by ecosystem degradation poses an existential risk to nations, societies and economies worldwide. For India, this is not a distant possibility but a present reality. As citizens of this country and stewards of its future, we are called upon not just to comply, but to lead, to adopt rigorous personal, communal and institutional measures to mitigate emissions, adapt to changing climates and strengthen resilience.

Global warming driven by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and compounded by ecosystem degradation poses an existential risk to nations, societies and economies worldwide. For India, this is not a distant possibility but a present reality. As citizens of this country and stewards of its future, we are called upon not just to comply, but to lead, to adopt rigorous personal, communal and institutional measures to mitigate emissions, adapt to changing climates and strengthen resilience.

India has pledged to reduce its GDP emissions intensity by 45% by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2070. The Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, 2023 establishes a baseline-and-credit system requiring energy-intensive industries to meet greenhouse gas emission intensity targets or purchase carbon credit certificates. This framework shifts India's regulatory focus from energy efficiency to carbon intensity, creating both mandatory compliance obligations and voluntary offset opportunities.

His Majesty's Treasury (HM Treasury) of the United Kingdom (UK) has formally recognised India's Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS) as a qualifying carbon pricing mechanism under the United Kingdom's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

This Piece examines whether remediation, pollution-control, and restoration obligations of industrial corporate debtors survive, attach to assets, or extinguished during insolvency resolution under the IBC, and outlines a due-diligence framework for resolution applicants.

As Indian cities hurtle toward rapid urban expansion, often celebrated in terms of GDP growth, infrastructure, and high-rise skylines, a quieter crisis unfolds at the edge of this development: the disappearance of urban wetlands.

India generates an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day, of which a substantial share, approximately 10,556 tonnes daily, remains uncollected and enters landfills or the open environment. To address this, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (“MoEFCC”) has notified a national Extended Producer Responsibility (“EPR”) framework for plastic packaging under the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016, as amended from time to time.

For listed companies, preparing the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) involves collecting data from multiple departments, consolidating performance indicators and ensuring that disclosures are complete, consistent and finalized within the reporting timeline. Companies must ensure that each disclosure is supported by reliable data, documented calculation methodologies and adequate records, with a clear basis for how the reported figures have been derived and validated. These requirements become particularly relevant as companies prepare for BRSR Core assessment or assurance.

Global warming driven by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and compounded by ecosystem degradation poses an existential risk to nations, societies and economies worldwide. For India, this is not a distant possibility but a present reality. As citizens of this country and stewards of its future, we are called upon not just to comply, but to lead, to adopt rigorous personal, communal and institutional measures to mitigate emissions, adapt to changing climates and strengthen resilience.

India’s climate commitments are substantial a net-zero target announced at COP26 and rapid growth in non-fossil energy capacity and clean-technology innovation across solar, wind, storage, electric mobility and waste management has grown alongside them. It is tempting to assume that a dedicated, incentive-rich “green patent” regime sits behind that innovation. The more accurate picture is of a patent system that accommodates green technology through general mechanisms, while stopping short of the bespoke incentives that some other jurisdictions have introduced.