Petition Statement:  We demand that the government of Telangana implement the “Cap and Trade” strategy in Hyderabad, specifically on the high carbon-emitting vehicles, as it is the best long-lasting sustainable solution that can be executed fast and strictly and has been seen to be effective, to reduce air pollution caused by traffic congestion and to overall reduce Hyderabad’s contribution to global climate change.

Supporting Detail: Climate change, the long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns is an ongoing global issue that affects the world, its environment, and humanity. These shifts are usually natural however recently human activities like driving cars, have become one of the main reasons for climate change. A regular vehicle can only work when the engine is running and for it to run, it has to burn the fuel inside it, and in doing so it emits harmful greenhouse gasses into the air such as carbon dioxide. At local levels, this causes air pollution, which is the single greatest threat to human health globally, but when adding up every local area in the world, globally, air pollution becomes a big problem as it causes climate change.

In our city of Hyderabad, we have a population of around 70 lakh and over 50 lakh vehicles, and the population is continuing to rapidly grow because of urbanization, therefore due to this rapid growth of the city, its population, and vehicles, the result is a lot of traffic on the roads. The more time a vehicle is on the road the more emissions it exerts, so if Hyderabad takes action to fix its traffic congestion problems and tries to reduce the amount of traffic on the roads and travel time, then air pollutions levels can be reduced in the city, positively impacting human health as well as being a small step in reducing the city’s contribution to global climate change.

In the past, the stakeholders of Hyderabad tried multiple methods to reduce the city’s traffic issue, however, it has been observed that some of these solutions are only helpful in the short term, and others take a long time to be executed, allowing traffic and pollution levels to skyrocket in the meantime, which is not sustainable. Therefore, the city of Hyderabad should look into a long-lasting sustainable solution that can be implemented fast and strictly and has been seen to be effective, and the main strategy that fits this criterion is the Cap and Trade method.

The cap and trade strategy is a system to reduce air pollution in a province and can be implemented specifically on high carbon-emitting vehicles. The government should cap these vehicles like trucks of companies and permit fuel companies based on every ton of carbon emitted from the burning of their fuel. With the income created from these permits, the city can invest in better, cleaner, and sustainable modes of transportation. Each year the government lowers the number of permits given out, thereby lowering the total cap emissions, making permits more expensive, and forcing companies to be motivated to reduce their emissions or invest in clean technology as it becomes cheaper than buying permits. If Hyderabad implemented this strategy, then in the long run it could lead to a positive step towards climate action.