Webinar: Incorporating political-feasibility concerns into the assessment of India’s environmental policies

Speakers: Wei Peng, Pallav Purohit, Aditya Valiathan Pillai, Johannes Urpelainen

Political-feasibility concerns are at the center of environmental policymaking in the developing world. Yet, these concerns are often not represented in leading decision-support tools that have been used for assessing policies’ impacts on air quality, health, and climate. With a focus on India, this webinar will discuss political and institutional factors that influence environmental policy choices/outcomes in India and the importance of incorporating these factors into quantitative policy assessment tools. Building on a recent open-access paper, the speakers will introduce their efforts to combine political and environmental assessment, including the development of a policy tool (PACE-India, Political Assessment of Clean Air and Environmental Policies for India).

More information: Wei Peng, Sung Eun Kim, Pallav Purohit, Johannes, Urpelainen, and Fabian Wagner. Incorporating Political Feasibility Concerns into India’s Clean Air Policies. One Earth. 4, 1-12, August 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.07.004

To attend the Webinar, register here.

Keynote Speakers:

Wei Peng is an assistant professor of international affairs and civil and environmental engineering at Penn State. Her research focuses on the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of energy policies. As an interdisciplinary researcher, her work combines computational modeling with social science insights to develop integrated policy solutions for energy, health and climate. Peng has studied climate and energy policies at the global scale and for major economies including China, India and the US. She has authored or co-authored nearly 30 scientific papers published in Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, PNAS, among others.

Pallav Purohit is Senior Research Scholar with the Pollution Management Research Group of the Energy, Climate and Environment (ECE) Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. His research work focuses on an integrated assessment of air pollution and greenhouse gases, mitigation potential and costs of fluorinated greenhouse gases, short-lived climate pollutants and techno-economic evaluation of renewable energy technologies. He has published extensively on these topics, both in the form of scientific peer-reviewed articles and policy reports.

Aditya Valiathan Pillai is an associate fellow at the Initiative for Climate, Energy and Environment at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). He studies the politics and institutions of climate governance in South Asia. His recent work, of relevance to this panel, pieces together the growth and decline of India’s climate institutions over three decades. He also writes about the emergence of climate governance in Indian federalism and South Asian regionalism. In his previous role as a program officer at The Asia Foundation, he managed support to South Asian civil society on transboundary river governance in the Indus, Ganga, and Brahmaputra.

Johannes Urpelainen is the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Professor of Energy, Resources and Environment (ERE) at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also the Founding Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP). He is the Director of the Master of Arts in Sustainable Energy (MASE), a 21-month hybrid (online and residential) degree to train a new generation of experts for clean energy and climate policy. Professor Urpelainen develops and tests sustainable solutions to the problem of lacking energy access in emerging economies. His research with ISEP, a groundbreaking research initiative on sustainable energy policy, offers pragmatic but effective approaches to providing the world’s population with affordable and abundant energy at minimal environmental impact.