The high rate of growth required for India to lift the standards of living of her people has already led to pressures on the availability and quality of key resources including water and energy as well as increased pollution and environmental degradation. ICICI Foundation's environmental sustainability work is centred on enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of India's current and future energy use.

Energy is essential for development. The challenge is to ensure that we can achieve maximum development impact with minimal emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and that we can ensure the cleanest possible energy use, minimising black carbon, ozone, and other air pollutants.

The environmental and development consequences of climate change and pollution touch on public health, quality of life, and agricultural productivity. In addition, public resources and systems are facing increasing strain as some of the effects of climate changes such as extreme weather and monsoon disruption become more apparent.

Ensuring that efficient energy is available to fuel India’s growth remains a significant challenge, particularly in rural areas of the country. We believe that it is critical to ensure that India’s growth path accelerates it towards the trend of energy efficiency. We are also committed to creating policies and practices that ensure that environmental quality is appropriately valued in firms and households decisions.

In the area of environmental sustainability, ICICI Foundation collaborates with and supports the Environmentally Sustainable Finance (ESF) group at Centre for Development Finance (CDF) in Chennai (www.ifmr-cdf.in) to identify ways in which resources for growth can be more effectively channelled to support environmental sustainability.

ESF focuses on research and action to inform environmental policymaking and implementation, integrate environmental sustainability into development initiatives, and support scalable commercial and non-profit interventions to make India’s economy more environmentally sustainable from the bottom up.

ESF’s initiatives include:

Climate change: institutions, information, infrastructure....and adaptation –
This project will investigate what determines peoples' awareness of climate change and risks, how these climate change risks can be effectively communicated, and how responses to these risks can be unfettered. Learn more.

Black carbon: strategies for emissions reduction – This initiative seeks to identify policies and business models to reduce emissions from both fossil fuel and biomass sources. ESF is currently focusing on ways to reduce household and small industry emissions given the health co-benefits. They will be looking at transport-related emissions in the near future.
Learn more.

Sustainable finance – Sustainable finance begins with recognising the risks – be they financial, social or environmental. Internationally, examples abound of companies or projects that have been shut down or heavily penalised as a result of adverse environmental impacts. Financial institutions that invest in such projects face a multitude of risks – to credit and collateral, as well as legal, regulatory and reputational risk. The threat of such penalties creates a strong incentive to integrate environmental and social risk assessment and management into financial institutions’ risk management processes.

The ESF team is currently identifying ways to increase risk recognition in the Indian context. Learn more.

Environmental quality and justice – This initiative seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of current institutional arrangements for enforcing environmental legislation and regulations in India and to identify ways in which implementation can be improved. Learn more.

Environmental policy and sustainability – The environment is a classic example of a public good where there is no incentive to produce or maintain the good. Addressing environmental problems therefore requires policy interventions in addition to market mechanisms. This initiative seeks to contribute research insights towards sustainable development policies with specific focus on energy, transportation, forestry and climate change.
Learn more.