ABSTRACT
India’s climate governance framework presents a paradox of legislative abundance and normative incoherence. While the constitutional ethos and a multiplicity of environmental statutes, from Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 to Energy Conservation Act, 2001, implicitly address facets of climate regulation, the absence of a dedicated, integrated Climate Change Act has engendered a regime of fragmented legal mandates and institutional silos. This research delves into structural fragmentation within India’s climate legal architecture and argues that the current assemblage of sectoral laws, policy instruments, and judicial interventions constitutes a diffuse and reactive model, ill-suited to the exigencies of a climate crisis that demands coherence, accountability, and anticipatory governance. Through a doctrinal and comparative legal analysis, this research maps the dispersion of authority among multiple authorities, such as Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), National Green Tribunal (NGT), and state-level entities, whose overlapping jurisdictions perpetuate regulatory uncertainty and institutional inertia. Drawing on international analogues, such as United Kingdom’s Climate Change Act, 2008 & Kenya’s Climate Change Act, 2016, the research contends that a unified statutory framework is indispensable to harmonize India’s mitigation and adaptation objectives within a binding, justiciable, and participatory governance structure. This research advances the proposition that India’s climate law must transition from a piecemeal environmental management model to a rights-based, principle-driven framework anchored in climate justice, intergenerational equity, and cooperative federalism. It recommends the enactment of comprehensive National Climate Change Framework Law that consolidates existing statutory mandates, institutionalizes coordination mechanisms, & embeds enforceable obligations across sectors and levels of governance. Only through such normative integration can India transform its fragmented legislative landscape into a coherent, forward-looking legal regime capable of addressing the unified challenge of climate change.
Keywords: Climate Governance, Environmental Law, Intergenerational Equity, Cooperative Federalism, Environmental Jurisprudence, Regulatory Integration, Climate Adaptation, Climate Mitigation.
BACKGROUND
India’s encounter with the climate crisis embodies a paradox of acute vulnerability amid legislative abundance. The country stands at the epicenter of escalating climatic perturbations, searing heatwaves, erratic monsoons, glacial retreat, coastal inundation, and biodiversity attrition, each amplifying socio-economic precarity and ecological degradation. Despite this existential threat, India’s legal and institutional response remains diffused across a patchwork of environmental, energy, and resource-management statutes, none of which directly articulates a coherent climate mandate. The constitutional vision under Art. 48A and 51A(g) establishes environmental protection as a state and citizen duty, yet these provisions operate aspirational, lacking justiciable precision in the context of climate change. Statutes, such as Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981, & Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, provide regulatory frameworks that are sectoral and remedial rather than systemic and anticipatory.[1] The resultant governance landscape is one of overlapping jurisdictions, fragmented accountability, and policy discontinuities, conditions ill-suited to the cross-sectoral and intertemporal character of the climate crisis.
This legal fragmentation reveals a deeper normative incongruity between India’s environmental jurisprudence & imperatives of climate governance. Judicial activism, through expansive interpretations of the right to life under Art. 21, has infused environmental concerns into fundamental rights discourse, yet the judiciary’s interventions remain episodic and case-contingent, unable to substitute for legislative coherence. The proliferation of policy instruments, such as National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and its subsidiary State Action Plans, demonstrates administrative intent but lacks the force of statutory obligation or mechanisms for inter-ministerial integration.[2] Consequently, India’s legal architecture operates in silos, addressing climate-related harms through disparate regimes of pollution control, disaster management, and energy regulation, without a unifying framework that aligns mitigation, adaptation, and equity objectives. The paradox thus persists, a nation with one of the most active environmental jurisprudences globally remains without a dedicated climate law, navigating a crisis of systemic proportions through fragmented statutory means.
According to CSEP Report on Climate Change Governance in India of March, 2025, the country lacks formal climate legislation at both union and state levels, relying instead on over 20 sector-specific environmental laws, such as Electricity Act of 2003 & Energy Conservation Act of 2001, resulting in governance inconsistencies and gaps that hinder coordinated action; India has committed to reducing emissions intensity by 45% from 2005 levels by 2030, achieving 500 GW of non-fossil fuel-based power capacity by 2030, and sourcing 50% of energy from renewables by 2030, potentially lowering cumulative carbon emissions by 1 billion tons, while targeting net-zero emissions by 2070; globally, 56 countries had enacted climate framework laws by 2020 covering 53% of emissions,[3] with examples including Germany’s Federal Climate Protection Act, 2019 mandating annual emissions budgets and South Africa’s Climate Change Act, 2024 mobilizing US$8.5 billion via the Just Energy Transition Partnership; domestically, the 15th Finance Commission (2021–2026) raised the forest cover criterion weight to 10% for fiscal transfers from 7.5% under the 14th, incentivizing ecological outcomes amid mixed empirical results showing positive but limited forest cover correlations; state classifications reveal 3 states (Maharashtra, Gujarat, & Tamil Nadu) with high readiness and urgency for low-carbon transitions, 7 with medium readiness and high urgency (e.g., West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh), and 3 with low readiness and high urgency (e.g., Bihar, Assam).[4]
[1] Gururaj D. Devarhubli & Bushra Sarfaraj Patel, Environmental Laws in India – An Introduction, 10 Int’l J. for Rsch. Applied Sci. & Eng’g Tech. 1038, (2022), https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2022.40423.
[2]Id.
[3]Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Climate Change Governance in India: Building the Institutional Framework (Discussion Note, Mar. 13 2025).
[4] Id.