IRIS and CDRI
Source: By Amitabh Sinha: The Indian Express
On 2 November 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with his UK counterpart Boris Johnson and a few other world leaders, launched a new programme to secure and strengthen critical infrastructure in small island states against disasters induced by climate change.
Named IRIS or Infrastructure for Resilient Island States, this programme is the first major work of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure which India had initiated in 2019.
The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) is all about climate-proofing critical infrastructure in member countries. As of now, 26 countries including the United States, Germany, UK, Australia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Japan are members of the coalition.
The coalition is supposed to serve as a ‘knowledge centre’ where member countries can share and learn best practices with respect to disaster-proofing infrastructure projects. The coalition will not create any new infrastructure but, instead, will work towards making existing and upcoming infrastructure in member countries more robust and resilient so that they can withstand climate disasters like floods, heat waves, cyclones, forest fires, rains and other such events.
According to CDRI estimates, every dollar invested in making infrastructure more resilient in low and middle-income countries can potentially save over four dollars in losses suffered when a disaster strikes.
There is a growing acknowledgment that despite actions being taken by countries to fight climate change, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and disasters is only expected to increase. Countries are already experiencing more intense floods, heat waves and forest fires every year and need to cope with these.
For example, the eastern coast of India, particularly along Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, has been experiencing more powerful and frequent cyclones every year. Thanks to significant progress in advance warning and tracking of these cyclones and timely evacuation of people, the loss of lives from these events has been greatly reduced over the years. But the threat to infrastructure has remained. Power plants stop functioning, communication towers get damaged, street lights get uprooted, train and flight operations have to be halted because of flooding. These have cascading effects on several other activities. The monetary costs of the damage and disruption run into billions of dollars every year.
The aim of CDRI is to minimize such damages and disruptions.
ISA – Harnessing solar power
The CDRI is the second international climate initiative that India has launched. The first was the International Solar Alliance (ISA) launched at the 2015 Paris climate change conference. ISA’s main objective is to promote large-scale harnessing and exploitation of solar energy. The equatorial and tropical regions of the earth get very good sunlight through most of the year, which is sufficient to meet the energy demands of many countries in this belt. Unfortunately, the deployment of solar power in these areas is very less. ISA is working towards changing that, mainly by bringing down the costs of technology and finance which can facilitate rapid and mass deployment of solar energy. It hopes to do so by aggregating the demand from a large number of countries, standardization of equipment and grid, and promoting research and development.
Taking this dream forward is the recent ambitious idea of One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG) that proposes a common grid through more than 100 countries so that solar power can be transferred from one country to another. This will stabilise the energy supply, overcome local and natural fluctuations in availability of sunlight, and maintain reliable base load capacities at all times.
Both ISA and CDRI are an attempt by India to claim climate change leadership at the global level. Both initiatives have received widespread support, not just from developing countries but also from the developed world. While the solar alliance would result in mitigation of greenhouse gases through large-scale switch from fossil fuels to solar energy, simultaneously addressing issues of energy access and energy security, CDRI is aimed towards the adaptation goal. Together, they form India’s vision for a global climate action that also takes into account issues of equity, development and special needs of developing and least-developed countries.
IRIS – Equipping island states
Just like OSOWOG forms a specific work programme towards realising objectives of the solar alliance, Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS) is an operationalisation of the CDRI initiative.
Small island states happen to be the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Several of them face the possibility of being wiped out from the face of the earth. According to the CDRI, several small island states have lost as much as 9 per cent of their GDP in single disasters in the last few years.
As co-chair of the CDRI executive council Kamal Kishore put it, infrastructures in these smaller countries are more critical than elsewhere because they have so few of them. “A larger country has several airports, for example. So, if one or two are damaged in climate disasters, the country can still manage its affairs by diverting operations elsewhere. But many of the small island states have a single airstrip. That is their only connection to the rest of the world and the only supply line,” he said.
It is not surprising that several small island states have joined the IRIS platform and have been drawing up plans to implement it. The main work would involve mobilising and directing financial resources towards building resilient infrastructure in these countries, retrofitting existing infrastructure, development of early warning systems, and development and sharing of best practices.
