Starting this World Environment Day, environment-conscious Mumbaiites will be enabled, with the click of a mouse, to keep tabs on the impact of climate change on their city.
The website www.mmr-ccrt.org.in, put together by a group of young professionals and launched at the Maharashtra Nature Park at Dharavi here on Wednesday, has tools to help calculate carbon footprints and suggest sustainable lifestyle changes conducive to environmental health. “The most important point is that there is no city-specific information on climate change in this part of the world. No tools really tell me what my actions mean for my city. We have painstakingly factored in many elements to build realistic tools. For example, at least 50 per cent of people travel in trains in Mumbai, but there was no calculator which addressed this and told me the exact impact of train travel on climate change in Mumbai,” says Shantanu Roy, senior vice-president of Environmental Management Centre LLP.
The EMC has designed 10 tools for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region – Environment Improvement Society (MMR-EIS), which was established by the Government of Maharashtra’s MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority) in 1996. The Society aims to promote environmental health in the Mumbai region.
“Our target groups are policymakers, citizens, school/college students and business organisations. The MMR has sponsored the project to ensure that these tools are made available to everyone freely. It has taken us a year-and-a-half to build these tools and put them up on the website,” Prasad Modak, Executive President, EMC, told The Hindu .
The tools — climate change calendar, a map of climate-change-related institutions in the MMR, online carbon footprint calculators for adults and children, fact sheets, presentations, posters, stickers, activity booklets, youth resource guide etc. — have been made interactive to engage the visitor’s interest.
