Amanda Leland is the executive director of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a global nonprofit that builds climate solutions on a bedrock of leading-edge science and equitable economics. She has worked with EDF for more than 20 years, having previously led their Oceans programme that advocated for responsible and sustainable fishing. In her current role, Amanda works on developing multilateral partnerships that identify emerging climate challenges and innovate solutions that benefit the environment, communities, and businesses.
Hisham Mundol is the chief adviser to EDF in India. He leads strategy on the organisation’s core verticals of energy transition, sustainable food production, and climate-resilient communities. Prior to working at EDF, Hisham set up Wikimedia Foundation’s operations in India and led Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in India.
IDR caught up with Amanda and Hisham on the sidelines of Climate Tech Convening India, a multi-stakeholder platform designed to catalyse the country’s climate tech ecosystem. The conversation covered solutions to the methane problem in India’s dairy sector, the risks associated with green hydrogen, and the need to frame climate solutions around the ‘triple win’.
Amanda, you’ve written that the solution to the climate crisis lies in navigating the science and economics of it. You call it the ‘messy middle approach’. Can you tell us what you mean by it?
Amanda: We’re entering a new time in the world, with new ideas, new technologies, and new solutions. There’s no off-the-shelf playbook to solving the problems related to climate—whether on how to reduce emissions or how to help people and nature thrive in the context of a changing climate. With new ideas, we don’t always know what the potential upsides and challenges are. So, the ‘messy middle’ is meant to embrace the fact that we don’t always know what the answers are, and we’ve got to attempt hard things and try to optimise for a variety of outcomes. It isn’t one thing over another. It’s not climate over growth, or climate over livelihoods. It’s got to be a ‘both…and’ solution, and those are hard to find. But when you find them, they’re very powerful.
We’re solving for multiple things at the same time, and we’re never going to meet the maximum of all those things at once. I do think, though, that it is important to find what we at EDF call ‘the triple win’, where you can improve environmental outcomes, livelihood outcomes, and health and welfare.
These solutions exist, but finding them is difficult. You’re going to need to lean in around the economics in some cases, and in others, around the science. For instance, there’s a lot of opportunity when it comes to reducing climate impacts in agriculture, particularly in dairy. There’s a big opportunity to improve the productivity of animals and to improve nutrition, economic welfare, and social mobility for people. It’s about systemic change, meeting people where they are, and solving for their needs in a way that will also enable better environmental outcomes.
Hisham: In India, fertiliser optimisation is an example of a ‘triple win’. We’re the world’s second biggest consumer of nitrogen fertiliser; the government spends USD 20 billion a year on it. Our estimates are that approximately 60 percent of fertiliser is excessively applied. Farmers are using more than what’s needed because it’s their last insurance policy. However, additional fertiliser isn’t going to give additional yield.
You need agriculture science to tell you how much fertiliser is optimum for which crop in which agroecological region. You need behaviour science to figure out how to persuade a farmer to make that change, because it’s a big risk you’re asking them to take. You need delivery mechanisms that can get it on the ground. But if accomplished, all of this can translate into savings for the government and the farmer, less nitrate pollution in the water, less nitrous oxide emissions in the air, and less emissions in the production of that fertiliser. So that’s a triple win right there, but you need to find a way of persuading the farmer and the government to act.
India ranks third in global methane emissions, and agriculture accounts for more than 70 percent of these. Considering the informal nature of the sector, what methane reduction measures do you propose to safeguard livelihoods and the environment at the same time?
Hisham: India produces a quarter of the world’s milk. We’re its largest producer, followed by the US. India produces double the quantity of milk produced in the US, but with 10 times the number of its heads of cattle. Much of this productivity problem can be addressed through better feeding, with the right mix of wet and dry fodder, and by using micronutrients as supplements.
How do we get more milk from these bovines? Farmers can’t afford expensive feed additives. The solution is to develop better feeding recipes that cost no more than 10 percent of what the farmer already spends on fodder. Building out the science can help develop appropriate recipes for different agroecological regions, because different kinds of wet and dry fodder are available across the country at different cost structures.
Once a nutritious and affordable feed mix is developed, it can be delivered to farmers through the existing supply chain of milk collection centres, dairy cooperatives, and private milk companies. EDF is working to incubate dairy entrepreneurs who will take the recipe into districts, and through local networks, nudge dairy farmers to try the new feed mix. So, the main way to address the livestock methane piece is to simply increase animal productivity.
The second biggest producer of methane in India is rice paddy farming. The solution, here, is a device for INR 20 called field water tube that is sunk into the soil. This perforated plastic tube has two level marks that indicate how much water the paddy field needs and how much should drain off. However, unlike the dairy supply chain, we have no mechanism to deliver this device to the farmers and persuade them to use it, because there are multiple barriers between buyer and seller. That’s the advantage dairy has over paddy.
Moving on to hydrogen… India is betting big on green hydrogen, but EDF has advocated for a cautious approach to developing and commercially deploying this energy source. What are some of your concerns?
Amanda: It’s important to understand that hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas. It increases the potency of methane emissions in the atmosphere and accelerates warming much faster than carbon dioxide. It’s also a very small molecule, so it’s prone to being leaky. The methane problem in the oil and gas sector is largely a leaky infrastructure problem. Hydrogen is likely leakier than methane, so you have to think about how to contain it in order to not have it leak into the atmosphere and cause more problems.
Green hydrogen has a lot of potential for particular use applications such as energy storage, fuel for transport, and in chemical and steel industries. At the same time, it’s important to consider the physical distance that hydrogen molecules must travel in the use chain for these applications, because transporting it in pipelines could be difficult.
Additionally, when it comes to producing green hydrogen—a process that uses renewable energy sources—you don’t want to divert renewable energy that could power a home or a car or communities and the economy to something that’s going to be much more energy inefficient in the transfer.
The economics around hydrogen is yet to be fully understood, too. We therefore have to be judicious about hydrogen and its applications, and try to anticipate some of the problems it may cause down the line. But we, at EDF, are definitely in support of the development and use of green hydrogen.
Hisham: Green hydrogen is the best form of hydrogen out there because it uses renewable energy as raw material. This gives India—which has one of the lowest costs of solar power generation on the planet—a good starting advantage. As part of its green hydrogen policy, the government has planned for 125 GW of renewable energy capacity addition for green hydrogen; this will help meet the mission’s benchmark of 5 MMT green hydrogen production capacity per annum. Having said that, our priority should be to use green hydrogen to first electrify homes, steel factories, aviation, shipping, and other large-scale consumers of energy, and then to electrify cars.
New climate technologies are being developed to address the climate crisis. Which of these excites you the most? And what would it take to develop and drive these technologies in India?
Amanda: I’m most excited about emerging agricultural solutions—about solutions that reduce methane emissions in the dairy sector, about opportunities around nitrogen reduction, and about climate-smart agricultural approaches allowing for a more resilient food production system that can withstand the shocks of climate change better.
Food is a basic need, we need more of it, and we need it to be better produced so that it has less of an impact on the climate. Production and productivity is shifting as weather patterns change and extreme weather events take place. And so, we’re going to need a more diversified approach to agriculture. Food producers are, and will continue to be, on the frontline of climate change, and these solutions offer an opportunity for them to gain some ground.
Hisham: I’m excited about bigger purchase orders being issued to Indian climate tech start-ups. We need more of them to scale up, and this will only happen when investors and corporates start signing bigger cheques. At the end of the day, investors don’t want to miss the boat on a promising new technology. When innovators talk about who has invested in them and which companies have partnered with them, VCs and investors become intrigued. So, creating opportunities for innovators and investors to come together and partner up is one way to drive climate tech in India.
Globally, energy and mobility garner the lion’s share of climate tech investments (39 and 40 percent), while high emission sectors such as agriculture receive a smaller portion (8 percent). Why is this and how can this emissions funding mismatch be corrected?
Hisham: There are several reasons for this. There were big government incentives for solar generation and electric vehicles, largely because their business models were clearly defined, the science was established, and everyone was talking about these technologies. So, energy and mobility received a big push.
The second barrier is that there’s greater risk. But there’s greater return as well in AgriTech. The next 10 unicorns are expected to come from the AgriTech value chain. And then we’ll hopefully have more government incentives in this area as well, such as incentives to reduce methane emissions from dairy and incentives for optimised fertiliser. The signal this could send to the rest of the ecosystem would be remarkable. Incidentally, in 2023, the PM PRANAM scheme was launched to promote natural farming and reduce the use of chemical fertilisers. The scheme awards 50 percent of the fertiliser subsidy saved by a state/union territory each year (compared to the average of the previous three years) as a grant to that state/union territory.
What else, alongside policy, can drive investments in AgriTech?
Hisham: We need more funding. There’s a lot more government and private sector funding in the West, which has shaped the innovation ecosystem there. There are also stronger partnerships between academia, government, and corporates, which is missing here. This lack of support is one of the reasons that R&D in climate tech lacks breadth and depth in India, a factor that can impact the climate tech market.
Data is foundational to developing effective climate solutions. In India’s case, is the data needed to develop these solutions available, and if it is, how do we use it?
Amanda: EDF works with partners to understand the underlying science before taking a strong position on whether to do this or that, because it’s important that we have credible information to begin with. In order to build credibility around data, different actors need to be involved in the development, provisioning, and checking of the data. For instance, we work with hydrogen policymakers to factor in potential hydrogen leaks, and that science will be published in peer-reviewed journals and disseminated, and we’ll talk about it with businesses.
Another big investment in data that EDF has made is MethaneSAT, a satellite we launched in March 2024 to track methane emissions across the globe. Our partners at the International Energy Agency and the International Methane Emissions Observatory are helping to ensure that the data gathered by MethaneSAT—which will soon be freely available on a public platform—becomes part of a data architecture that people consider reliable and relevant. The initiative is about creating strategic partnerships that can ensure that the information is viewed by oil and gas companies, civil society organisations, nonprofits, and governments as credible and important to their ability to make change.
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