LeadIT 3.0 to Be Launched at COP31 in Antalya

Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav sat down in New Delhi with Indian companies from the hard-to-abate industries and with research institutes, ahead of India’s participation in the United Nations climate conference COP31 at Antalya in Turkiye. The meeting was built around the Leadership Group for Industry Transition, better known as LeadIT, and the minister said the ministry and the government stand behind collaborative climate action.

What LeadIT is

LeadIT is a public-private partnership started by India and Sweden in 2019 at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, with support from the World Economic Forum. Its purpose is to cut carbon from heavy industry, the part of the economy hardest to clean up. Membership now stands at 19 countries and 33 companies, of which 13 are Indian. The Prime Ministers of India and Sweden announced a renewed mandate for the group in May 2026.

The third phase

The minister and Sweden’s Ministry of Climate and Enterprise will launch LeadIT 3.0 on 17 November 2026 at the LeadIT Industry Leaders Roundtable during the Antalya conference. Mr Yadav described the coming phase as a platform built for implementation, one meant to turn ambition into results rather than restate intent, and said India’s approach rests on cooperation between government, industry and academia.

Who was in the room

• Steel and cement members: Tata Steel, JSW Steel, SAIL, Synergy Advanced Metals, Adani Ambuja Cement, Dalmia Cement, JK Cement, JSW Cement and UltraTech Cement.
• Transport members: Volvo Group and SpiceJet.
• Project partners under the India-Sweden Industry Transition Partnership: Jindal Steel and Power, Prism Johnson, Höganäs India and MyHome Industries.
• Research partners: the National Council for Cement and Building Materials and the Indian Institutes of Technology at Bombay, Bhubaneswar, Dhanbad, Hyderabad and Kharagpur.

What industry asked for

Member companies said the platform had helped them form project partnerships, test whether technologies are workable and share what they had learned. They asked for more help with preparing projects before the competitive stage, with running pilot plants and with building skills, which is the agenda the next phase is expected to carry.