By Avinash Nair
Last week, the Gujarat government launched what is being described as the world’s first market for trading in particulate matter emissions. While trading mechanisms for pollution control do exist in many parts of the world, none of them is for particulate matter emissions. For example, the CDM (carbon development mechanism) under the Kyoto Protocol allows trade in ‘carbon credits’; the European Union’s Emission Trading System is for greenhouse gas emission; and India has a scheme run by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency that enables trading in energy units.
“Industries in this area are emitting way above [the cap] at 362 tonnes per month. To bring them down to 280 will be a huge reduction. In the future this cap may be reduced below 280 tonnes,” said Gargi Goswami, a research associate at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with its global office at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, J-PAL, along with Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago in India, and NeML and South Gujarat Textile Processors Association are partners in the ETS project.