Stakeholder Consultations Report: Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants in India

This report elaborates and summarizes salient learnings and insights from stakeholder consultations conducted in the form of two workshops – one focused on the residential-sector during 15-17 December 2017 in Mumbai, India, and one focused on the IT-sector on 14 March 2018 in Bengaluru, India. It distils the primary barriers, and indicative solutions for addressing them, that emerged from the workshops and consultations. These outputs can be harnessed for designing a technical assistance facility that seeks to accelerate the uptake of sustainable cooling technologies (SCTs) in India to achieve the goal of mitigating emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (HCFCs and HFCs from the space cooling sector, in this case).

The barriers were seen to cluster amongst four barrier ‘types’: ‘Performance uncertainty’, ‘unawareness and misinformation’, ‘lack of standardization’, ‘higher first cost’. Technology specific barriers have also been identified and are articulated explicitly in the report. The understanding of pivotal barriers and their causes, as expressed herein, have evolved, deepening and expanding, concomitant with the progress of the consultation process in time and scope.

Consultations with stakeholders provided possible interventions for consideration in the proposed Technical Assistance (TA) Facility, which is designed to address financial as well as non-financial barriers to accelerating uptake of non-HFC comfort-cooling technologies in India. These possible interventions are explored in the Solutions section.

The consolidation process has begun of the insights, ideas and high-level solutions that have emerged emphatically (and have in-principle buy-in from stakeholders consulted), and will be synthesized into learnings to aid the technical assistance finance-facility design process by Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (FS).

The TA Facility detailed design process will continue by working with select stakeholder organisations to evolve new ideas and refine solutions arrived during the stakeholder consultation phase. The detailed TA design will outline features of each element and modalities of implementation including indicative budget.

Post that, in May 2018, stakeholder re-consultations will commence to ensure that all barriers to mainstreaming sustainable cooling technologies in the IT/commercial and residential sectors have been addressed in an adequate manner through the TA facility, and partnerships are in place for the successful execution of the facility.