Climate Change & Covid-19
Focus should be on Building Climate and Disaster Resilient Villages
Virtual Dialogue-Is Climate Change Anything to do With COVID Pandemic?
Bhubaneswar, July 26
With breakthroughs and new inventions in Medical Science COVID-19 may be short-lived, but climate change is here to stay. Climate change has been an existential crisis and would pose more severe threat to humankind. “We need to act on it sooner rather than later as climate variability and extreme weather events have become more frequent”, said Visiting Professor of School of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences of IIT Bhubaneswar Prof U C Mohanty. All its need is more focus should be on building climate and disaster resilient villages and preparing resilient cities, so that people will survive in future threats like Coronavirus Pandemic, added Prof Mohanty.
Dr Mohanty was speaking at the virtual dialogue –Is climate change anything to do with COVID-19? A national webinar on Climate Change, Environmentalism and Covid-19 being organized by the city based Focus Odisha Foundation in collaboration with COVID19-Civil Society Initiative, Mahashakti Foundation and Migration Watch India.
In his keynote address, CEO of New Delhi based Research Organization i-FOREST Chandra Bhushan underlined the need for a strategic and cautious approach at both policy and community level to protect and conserve our environment, ecology and biodiversity. He further added that because of massive deforestation, changing eating habits of humans to consume more exotic foods and intensive destruction of natural resources we are witnessing massive spread and outbreak of virus and bacteria related diseases. “That’s ostensibly the reason zoonotic and novel virus spread, though during the last
twenty years we have experienced with frequent outbreak of swine flu, Bird Flu, SARS, Ebola etc, COVID- 19 has become more serious with its spread of both in length and breadth”, Bhushan added.
“Even though, there is no scientific evidence or study to relate climate change with COVID Pandemic, but circumstantial reality shows, there is an intrinsic relationship and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has time and again warned about serious health hazards due to changing climate”, stated Bhushan.
Retired Bureaucrat and State Resource Person for Competitive Commission of India Pradip K Biswal stressed the need for policy and plan integration of ecological aspects and emerging climate challenges. Director of Focus Odisha Foundation and Moderator of the virtual event Sudarshan Chhotoray described both climate change and COVID-19 as two sides of one coin and said that human interference with nature is coming to haunt us. Both caused by the exploitation of natural resources. What will happen if we fail to address the climate crisis with appropriate measures, he questioned.
The webinar was coordinated by Jugal K Patnaik and Shrushrita Rath of Mahashakti Foundation.
Regards,
Sudarshan Chhotoray