An Analysis of Carbon Market and Carbon Credits in India

Global climate change is becoming an alarming problem of the 21st century, with global warming as the biggest challenge. Anthropogenic activities have added significant quantities of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere ever since the Industrial Revolution. The agriculture sector is a significant source of GHG emission in many countries. Crop stubble burning or agricultural biomass burning is one of the highest contributors to this emission. In India, around 92 million tons of crop residue is burned every year, causing several negative impacts on the climate as well as on human health. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Carbon trading and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are the two robust processes to mitigate the GHG emissions for any country. In this study, we have assessed the overview of world’s carbon market and analysed how much carbon credit India may have traded in the world carbon market, if emission from the crop residue burning was stopped in the Indian agricultural sector. Further we have fitted an econometric model to determine the effect of carbon trading on other stock market variable.