Surat’s Emission Trading Project Can Be A Powerful Tool To Reduce Air Pollution
New Delhi: On World Environment Day on June 5, 2019, Gujarat launches the world’s first-ever market-based particulate pollution regulation system as a pilot project. The system provides economic incentives to industrial units that successfully control their emissions of particulate pollutants. The government sets a cap on particulate emission levels and then allows industries to buy and sell permits in order to stay below the cap. Permits are certificates earned by companies that have achieved emissions reductions to meet their targets, which they can sell to companies that have failed to meet theirs. This could work better than India’s current command-and-control approach to pollution regulation, which has resulted in high levels of non-compliance, caused also by the lack of high-quality information.