BRIDGING THE POLICY GAP: A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF CARBON MITIGATION FRAMEWORKS IN CHINA AND THE EUROPEAN UNION FOR INDIA'S NET-ZERO TRANSITION

Abstract

The urgent need for climate action has prompted countries worldwide to adopt net-zero targets and carbon mitigation strategies. India, now the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2070 as part of its updated Nationally Determined Contribution. Despite this ambition, India's climate strategy has relied on sectoral policies and traditional environmental laws, including the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, that predate the climate discourse and do not explicitly address greenhouse gas emissions, creating a policy gap between India's climate commitments and the binding legal instruments needed to achieve them. By contrast, the European Union and China have developed comprehensive carbon mitigation frameworks through binding climate laws, emissions trading systems and related regulation from which India may draw lessons. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of India's climate-related legislation against the European Union's and China's legal instruments, focusing on international, environmental and comparative law dimensions, and identifies concrete insights for bridging India's policy gap. It argues that India's net-zero transition is constrained not by ambition or technological capacity but by a structural legal deficit that separates climate intent from enforceable governance, and it proposes a context-sensitive legislative architecture that draws selectively on both comparators without transplanting either wholesale.