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A) Vision for a sustainable world:
A sustainable world is one which meets the needs of the present generation without risking that of the future generations.The way the people use energy in this century will influence the way we live for generations in the future. There are great consequences for careless wastage of energy and resources. Wastage of 1 ounce of fuel everyday can lead to no energy available for one part of the world in the future.
B) Plans for making it a reality:
More than 80 percent of the population now resides in urban areas, a number that is projected to continue to increase. Cities and their suburbs account for a proportion of the urban economy far higher than their share of population. Urban areas have been associated with several environmental and social inequities, such as disproportionate levels of air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, increased rates of poverty, and high rates of wealth inequity. Despite these problems, urban centers may have the potential to be more sustainable than suburban or rural areas. Through smart land-use planning, they can locally greatly reduce environmental impacts with lower per capital energy and water use.
Oceans comprise 97% of the Earth's water bodies. According to several surveys around 3 billion people reside within 200 kg of coasts and the numbers keep increasing everyday. They can tap ocean energy using the Oscillating Wave Surge Converter (OWSC) device. This device extracts energy from the surge motion in the waves. These are generally seabed mounted devices in near-shore sites with water depth of 10-20m.
Pictures of OWSCs:
We can also use solar panels, windmills and hydroelectric power plants.
C) Impact of colonization on our Journey To a Sustainable World:
As time goes ahead technology evolves and so do humans. There have been recent innovations of air filters introduced all over the world so that we can overcome pollution.
A modern domestic air filter.
Public air filter concepts
The introduction of electronic cars is also excellent.
These are electronic economical cars that are totally run on batteries and are also being sold and rented at many places in the world.
The interior structure of a concept of an electronic car.
A concept car from Mercedes Benz that will be running on batteries and is totally energy efficient.
The concept series of energy efficient cars.
There are many other innovations and technologies that are going to be introduced, which shows the concern of people for Mother Earth.
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Oct 19, 2017 Adapting water management to climate change in India COP 23 Mentor Anna Wilson
Azhoni, A., Ian, H., & Simon, J. (2017). Adapting water management to climate change: Institutional involvement, inter-institutional networks and barriers in India. Global Environmental Change, 44144-157.
Highlights•Quantitative website analysis supplemented with qualitative interview.•Limited link between water and climate change in online documents.•Inter-institutional network drawn based on online documents differ from interview.•Limited inter-institutional networks hinders adaptation.•A novel concept for analysing multi-institutional involvement and networks.
The capacity of a nation to address the hydrological impacts of climate change depends on the institutions through which water is governed. Inter-institutional networks that enable institutions to adapt and the factors that hinder smooth coordination are poorly understood. Using water governance in India as an example of a complex top-down bureaucratic system that requires effective networks between all key institutions, this research unravels the barriers to adaptation by combining quantitative internet data mining and qualitative analysis of interviews with representatives from twenty-six key institutions operating at the national level.Institutions' online presence shows a disconnect in the institutional discourse between climate change and water with institutions such as the Ministries of Water Resources, Earth Sciences and Agriculture, indicating a lesser involvement compared to institutions such as the Ministries of Finance, External Affairs, Planning Commission. The online documents also indicate a more centralised inter-institutional network, emanating from or pointing to a few key institutions including the Planning Commission and Ministry of Environment and Forests. However, the interviews suggest more complex relational dynamics between institutions and also demonstrate a gap between the aspirational ideals of the National Water Mission under the National Action Plan on Climate Change and the realities of climate change adaptation. This arises from institutional barriers, including lengthy bureaucratic processes and systemic failures, that hinder effective inter-institutional networks to facilitate adaptation. The study provides new understanding of the involvement and barriers of complex multi-layered institutions in climate change adaptation.
The capacity of a nation to address the hydrological impacts of climate change depends on the institutions through which water is governed. Inter-institutional networks that enable institutions to adapt and the factors that hinder smooth coordination are poorly understood. Using water governance in India as an example of a complex top-down bureaucratic system that requires effective networks between all key institutions, this research unravels the barriers to adaptation by combining quantitative internet data mining and qualitative analysis of interviews with representatives from twenty-six key institutions operating at the national level.Institutions' online presence shows a disconnect in the institutional discourse between climate change and water with institutions such as the Ministries of Water Resources, Earth Sciences and Agriculture, indicating a lesser involvement compared to institutions such as the Ministries of Finance, External Affairs, Planning Commission. The online documents also indicate a more centralised inter-institutional network, emanating from or pointing to a few key institutions including the Planning Commission and Ministry of Environment and Forests. However, the interviews suggest more complex relational dynamics between institutions and also demonstrate a gap between the aspirational ideals of the National Water Mission under the National Action Plan on Climate Change and the realities of climate change adaptation. This arises from institutional barriers, including lengthy bureaucratic processes and systemic failures, that hinder effective inter-institutional networks to facilitate adaptation. The study provides new understanding of the involvement and barriers of complex multi-layered institutions in climate change adaptation.
This study suggests that, in a developing country context, climate change is rarely the sole motivation for adapting water to climate change so that the perceived opportunities that climate change may bring lie in enabling policy-makers to allocate additional resources for water infrastructure development. The findings of this study suggest that adaptation strategies in developing countries, such as India, need to be aligned with delivering co-benefits from developmental projects. However, developing countries, such as India, that have a complex multi-layered system of water governance need to address the institutional and systemic challenges that hinder the smooth coordination and accessibility to data and information and the competing priorities of infrastructural and technological developmental priorities.
Great Post! the use of sustainable forms of energy is central to solving climate change.
India and Climate Change
India Holds Up Farmers’ Plight from Extreme Weather for COP21 DelegatesBy Manipadma Jena
An Indian tribal woman transplants paddy saplings into dry soil as first monsoon rains arrive on time 2015, but abruptly cease into a long dry spell. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPSNEW DELHI, Dec 2 2015 (IPS) - “If you look at the submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs, the national commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030) by over 150 countries, most have announced mitigation-centric targets, whereas climate change is also about adaptation. India is among the few that has given a comprehensive INDC,” Ashok Lavasa, a key official of India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and part of its COP21 team at Paris, told IPS.A new report by Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) bears out India’s demand at COP 21 for resources to adapt. The CSE report finds in 2013, five states were impacted and 0.35 million hectares of standing crops affected which in 2014 increased to six states being affected, and 5.5 million hectares of crops, just a month away from being harvested, were damaged. In 2015, as many as 15 states were hit and 18.23 million hectares or one-third of cropped area was damaged. The losses to farmers were in excess of 4 billion dollars.Around 62 per cent of India’s people depend on agriculture. Six out of ten farmers depend on rain for irrigation and at high risk to the vagaries of changing weather patterns.Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, a prominent 88-year-old geneticist known as the father of India’s Green Revolution of the 1960s, said the impact of weather events on agriculture was indicated by the fact that India recently imported 10 million tonnes of pulses. “Fifty years ago when India started the green revolution, it was importing 10 million tonnes of wheat. We seem to be back to the same situation because of climate change,” he said.According to a new United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) report, The Human Cost of Weather-Related Disasters 1995-2015, says in the last 20 years there have been 6,457 floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and other climatic events. Asia bore the brunt of these mainly due to its large and varied landmass, including multiple river basins, flood plains and other zones at high risk from natural hazards, plus high population densities in disaster-prone regions.Over this period, 805 million Indians have been affected out of 4.1 billion people globally.Overall, annual economic losses from disasters globally are estimated by UNISDR at between 250 billion and 300 billion dollars.Underscoring the need for resources by developing countries to adapt to climate change, Lavasa said, “India being a developing economy, there are lots of demands on its resources. To bring people above the poverty line India has to provide vast numbers of rural employment, education for all, provide basic healthcare and safe housing, provide for the huge road connectivity deficit that still cut off rural areas. Add to these energy access that a third of India’s mostly rural population is deprived of. All these require huge resources.”According to UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, India has 194 million or a quarter of the undernourished population in the world. India has to tackle this huge problem of food security even while 25 per cent of its total land area is undergoing desertification and 32 per cent facing degradation owing to droughts and soil erosion that are impacts of climate variability. India today has a total of around 100 million hectares officially classified as degraded land.India’s experience with adverse consequences of climate change goes beyond the vulnerable farm sector. “India has more than 7,000 kilometres of coastline with as much as 15 per cent of its total 2.28 billion population. These are regions where the poorest people reside and face the fury of cyclones and tsunamis. India also has more than 1,200 islands that are equally vulnerable like small island nations,” Lavasa said, adding that 12 or one-third of Indian states are in the Himalayan range affected by glacier melts, which are also affecting India’s major water sources.“So the argument which has been made by India for the COP21 climate deal is that because of its diverse and acute vulnerability, India is keen to act, but it has always said that because these problems have been created historically by the action of many other countries and now there is a realization that it is a global problem. Therefore not only has there to be a global resolve to solve the problem but here have to be global resource to solve it,” Lavasa told IPS.
The climate deal discussions) cannot leave countries to themselves and say you (developing countries) do things according to your capabilities and we (developed economies) will do things according to our capabilities and that’s the end of the story,” Lavasa added.
“The negotiators at the climate talks in Paris, need to be mindful of the impact of changing climate on agriculture, and the devastating consequences it has on farmers as well as the food security prospects of the world,” said CSE’s Chandra Bhushan.
The CSE report is also a peek into the future—what we should expect as our planet continues to heat up due to the incessant increase in greenhouse gas emissions,” Bhusan added.
Good work. Lets try to compile.
Kasandra Springford
Oct 19, 2017