Indian citizens join Greenpeace on climate alert campaign
Citizens, celebrities and politicians joined the Blue Alert campaign to highlight what could be the coastline of the future, if the climate crisis wasn’t prevented.
Focus on mitigation “India invests huge amounts in protecting its national boundaries from military incursions, but it is ignoring the climate crisis that can redraw its coastlines permanently and displace as many as 50 million people in India and 75 million more in Bangladesh”, said Brikesh Singh , Climate and Energy Campaigner from Greenpeace. “While climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity in the coming century, India needs to recognise that mitigating the threat by building a low carbon economy is the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century. "We need to position ourselves to take advantage of the emerging opportunities by proactively investing in the sustainable energy technologies of the future with a view to being world leaders in them,” added Brikesh Singh, making the case for India to focus on mitigation as against adaptation while formulating the National Climate Action Plan to be announced in June this year. Climate migrants The Blue Alert campaign, in the last three weeks has engaged people through posting climate hazard signs, slapping eviction notices on buildings under threat of submergence and organising climate migrant kiosks in vulnerable localities in the five coastal cities. More than 5,000 people have signed postcards of concern to their MPs calling for them to raise this issue in Parliament. Responding to their concern, and the media reports, a number of MPs including Milind Deora and Priya Dutt in Mumbai, Dr K S Manoj and Francis George in Kochi, Krishnaswamy and Dhanuskodi Athithan from Tamilnadu and Sujon Chakrabarti and Shamik Lahiri in Kolkata have expressed their concern and promised to debate the wisdom of “adapting” to a climate crisis in the coming session of Parliament in meetings with Greenpeace campaigners. Earlier, Greenpeace released a report focusing on the humanitarian crisis the South Asian region could face if global warming was not kept below the 2 degree tipping point. “Blue Alert – Climate Migrants in South Asia: Estimates and Solutions", a paper authored by Dr Sudhir Chella Rajan, professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras, and a climate expert, estimates the number of people who could be displaced from their homes at 125 million in India and Bangladesh alone. To put that figure in perspective, it is the equivalent of 10 times the migration at the time of Partition or 375 times the displacement caused by the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Source: Greenpeace |
Printable version
Back to top
