Conservation activists have demanded that the Tamil Nadu government declare a carbon neutral policy for the State.
The forum also wanted the Tamil Nadu government to appeal to all Chief Ministers to press the Prime Minister to declare a carbon neutral stand at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is scheduled to be held in Glasgow between October 31 and November 12.
The NGOs and activists made the appeal at a meeting held in Coimbatore on Monday, mainly based on the findings of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.
As per the report, India is one of the countries that could witness serious consequences of climate change with ‘Indian monsoon shift’ listed as one of the ‘tipping points’ – a threshold beyond which certain impacts can no longer be avoided even if temperatures are brought back down later, according to IPCC, said Poovulagin Nanbargal’s G. Sundarrajan.
“The Sixth Assessment Report of the Working Group I of the IPCC says that climate change, especially global warming, is the result of human interventions. The present and future generations are going to live between climate change-induced natural disasters. When scientists analysed 420 extreme natural disasters, 80% of them were found to be caused by climate change. Reasons for the remaining 20% could not be concluded due to insufficient data,” he said.
He pointed out that natural carbon sinks (places that absorb more carbon than they release) like oceans and forests were losing their capacity due to environmental degradation. Oceans are capable of absorbing nearly 50 % of the carbon that is released into the atmosphere, he said.
K. Kalidasan of Coimbatore-based ‘Osai’ organised the meeting which saw participation by representatives of various NGOs. He said that the forum will appeal to the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister to declare a carbon neutral policy at the earliest and execute scientific measures to reduce carbon emissions.
