Arunabha Ghosh: Asia has begun the green transition. Can it make it last?

The standard measure of climate leadership – the ambition of national targets – is a poor predictor of who will actually deliver.

Asia is in the midst of three simultaneous races: the race to electrify, the race to clean electrons, and the race to stay in it for the long haul. Winning any one is meaningless without winning all three.

Asia has shown progress on the first. Electrification rates have surged from 81% to 98% in a decade. This includes areas where access to modern energy was once a distant aspiration. As Asia’s economies grow, so does its share of electricity in total final energy consumption, from roughly 21% to 30%, or 15% to 23% if we exclude the region’s largest economies. The tailwind is there. The question is whether we can harness it.

Why Arunabha Ghosh? Few figures have been as closely involved in building the institutions and ideas that have shaped India and South Asia’s climate and energy transition. Ghosh founded the Council on Energy, Environment and Water in 2010 and built it into one of the world’s best climate think-tanks and a leading institution in Asia. He played a formative role in creating the International Solar Alliance, and has worked across the UN system and global climate negotiations. In 2025, Brazil appointed him COP30 special envoy for South Asia. His impressive career gives weight to the question at the heart of this essay: as Asia’s transition accelerates, can it build the markets, institutions and resilience needed to deliver it at scale?

The second race – clean electrons – is crucial because electrification without decarbonisation is a half-measure. Asia is showing real promise here too. In India alone, there has been a five-fold increase in the annual addition of clean electricity capacity – from 11 gigawatts (GW) in 2019 to 55 GW in the 2025-2026 financial year. Non-fossil sources now power over 54% of India’s grid capacity.

The country has installed over 304 GW of non-fossil capacity, up from virtually nothing two decades ago. The story is similar in electric mobility: 2.4 million electric vehicles were sold in India last year; and over 1.5 million in just the first five months of this financial year. Here is the detail that matters: 92% of those are two-wheelers and three-wheelers – the vehicles that low-income households actually use. This is an energy and mobility transition for people at large, not a select few.

The region is also demonstrating that the economics of decarbonisation can work. India’s green hydrogen target of 5 million tonnes per annum by 2030 is the second largest in the world, after the European Union.

But targets are not the story. What matters is what the market is revealing. The latest prices for green ammonia out of India are approximately USD 550 per tonne, compared to roughly USD 1,000 in Europe. Similar price discovery is happening in China. When the clean option becomes the cheaper option – in part due to scale economies that industrialising Asia offers – the transition ceases to be a moral choice alone and becomes an economic imperative and opportunity.

So why have these needles moved? Because India – and other Asian economies – have understood that ambition without foundations is merely exhortation. You need policy. You need market design. And you need institutional innovation. India’s journey is built on all three foundational pillars, resulting in a story of ratcheting ambition.

In 2010, it set a target of 20 GW of solar power capacity by 2022. In 2015, that was raised to 175 GW for all renewables. Then, in 2021, it set a target of 500 GW for non-fossil power capacity by 2030. The ambition was matched by reverse auctions – where project developers compete to set the lowest price they can sell electricity for – that drove solar tariffs down by over 86% between 2010 and 2024.

It was matched by a green hydrogen auction that drove green ammonia prices to about USD 0.5 per kilogram. It was matched by markets that put a price on emissions intensity. And it was matched by new institutions. The Solar Energy Corporation of India, for example, solved for the market failure of poorly financed power distribution companies. It signed power-purchase contracts with clean energy developers and separate power-sales contracts with the utilities. The result: de-risking renewable energy generators and enabling them to attract lower-cost financing.

This is what it takes to move from pilot to scale. Pilots are easy. Scale is hard. And scale requires the architecture of delivery. In addition to national actions, regional cooperation will be critical. Southeast Asia’s ASEAN Power Grid is already operational with 200 MW to Singapore and eight interconnections up and running. Clean power trade between Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh – with India as a central transmission hub – is becoming another vector of opportunity.

Which brings us to the third race – staying in it for the long haul. This is where leadership will be truly tested.

First, we must invest in resilience for infrastructure. The Asia-Pacific region, along with Africa and other tropical regions, is seeing a rise in heat-related mortality. Cooling demand is projected to become one of the biggest drivers of electricity demand. In India, over 40% of electricity demand by 2050 will come from cooling services. To move from risk to resilience requires national coordination and regional cooperation. CEEW identified that over 57% of Indian districts are now heat hotspots. The institution is developing neighbourhood-scale heat action plans for Indian cities (300 by 2027) – moving from district-level assessments to hyperlocal precision. This approach is now being expanded regionally through the Global Heat Health Information Network for South Asia, which covers Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal as well.

The data centre and AI boom adds another layer of complexity. Across the world, about 11,700 data centres are operational and demand for them is rising. But will some places become too hot to host them? In one study of about 9,000 data centres, about 600 were already located in areas that exceed the ideal operating threshold of 27C.

Will some places become too dry to cool them? In the United States alone, two out of three data centres, built or planned, are in highly water-stressed areas. In India, of 271 operational data centres, more than 65% are concentrated in just six regions, and a large number are already exposed to 30C for 90 or more days a year. By 2040, that figure will climb to 90%.

This demands hyperlocal, risk-informed siting and investment decisions – the kind enabled by platforms like CRAVIS.ai. This tool, currently built for India, is a first of its kind from the Global South. It layers 40 years of climate data across 279 indicators with projections out to 2070, delivering actionable intelligence for policymakers, investors and insurers. Similar platforms can be built for other geographies as well.

Secondly, we must inject resilience into the food-water-energy nexus. The monoculture trap is a vulnerability Asia can no longer afford. Seventy-five per cent of the world’s food supply comes from just 12 plant and five animal species, with wheat, rice, sugarcane and corn dominating. These plants are highly vulnerable to climate volatility, pests and disease. Moving towards millets, which Asia produces in abundance, offers a triple dividend. Finger millet has 10 times more calcium than rice. Shifting just 3.5 million hectares from rice to millets can save enough water to meet one-fifth of India’s annual household needs. And millet-based systems reduce input costs for farmers while creating jobs.

Similarly, natural farming in states like Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan has demonstrated significant reductions in fertiliser use – with its co-benefits for emissions, energy and water. In urban areas, the opportunity is equally large. Less than 30% of India’s wastewater is currently treated, but a circular economy for water could unlock a USD 26-35 billion market by 2047. Every litre of treated water reused saves energy, reduces pollution, and creates new revenue streams.

Thirdly, we must build resilience through a green economy. The green economy is not just energy. It is a nested opportunity across energy transition, circular economy and bioeconomy. Thirty-six emerging green value chains across India offer a UD 4.1 trillion investment opportunity by 2047, adding USD 1.1 trillion addition to GDP, and – most importantly – 48 million full-time equivalent jobs. This is where the resilience of the sustainability transition meets the resilience of livelihoods.

So what does this mean for climate leadership in Asia? It means moving beyond the metrics of ambition to the metrics of delivery. The next 20 years will not be won by who pledges the most. They will be won by who builds the institutions, designs the markets, and invests in resilience to stay in the race. Asia has the technology, the capital, and the demand. What it needs is the political and financial imagination to connect them at the speed and scale the crisis demands. That is the leadership test of the next two decades. And it is a test that Asia must pass on its own terms – charting its own unique pathway.