Towards Integrated Green Credit and Carbon Market Regime in India: Legal and Policy Reforms for Nationally Determined Contributions Implementation

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Scholars studying carbon market design, climate policy integration, and MRV systems will find the comparative analysis and reform proposals valuable.

🏢実務担当者:Corporate sustainability teams looking to participate in Indian carbon markets should note the regulatory uncertainty and need for interoperable credits.

🏛政策担当者:Indian policymakers and regulators can use the proposed legal framework as a blueprint for integrating green and carbon credits to meet NDCs.

India’s new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement (2015) set out ambitious targets for the country by 2030. For operationalisation of these commitments, two landmark market-based instruments have been launched in India, the Green Credit Programme (GCP) under the Green Credit Rules, 2023, under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS), notified by India’s Ministry of Power under the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022, establishes the domestic Indian Carbon Market (ICM). While these are important legislative progresses, these mechanisms are autonomous, with different laws, different ministries and different institutional set-ups. Coordinated interaction is ongoing through mechanisms like the National Steering Committee for the Indian Carbon Market, but these mechanisms are not fully integrated into statutory frameworks or providing a unified registry for seamless interaction between them or with the overall NDC implementation commitments. This paper critically discusses this regulatory fragmentation, provides a comparative study of integrated climate market systems in the European Union, China and Singapore, and suggests a modified legal and policy approach for an integrated climate market system in India. It claims that the lack of a comprehensive legal framework and stringent Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) parameters is a fundamental loophole that will severely affect India’s ability to achieve its Paris Agreement targets by 2030. The paper suggests interlinked reforms, which form the bedrock of a credible, coherent, and NDC-aligned climate market regime for India: enactment of an Indian Climate Act, establishment of a Unified Climate Market Regulatory Authority, statutory interoperability and unified MRV standards between green credits and carbon credits, a domestic Article 6 implementation framework, and a phased integration roadmap.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.82472first seen 2026-06-29 05:29:23 · last seen 2026-06-29 05:29:26