India Extremely Vulnerable To Global Warming

Bangalore: The change in climate due to global warming is said to affect India's future as much as other countries like the U.S. and China, said experts from Imperial College, London.

Sir Brain Hoskins, director, Grantham Institute for Climate Change (Imperial College of London) said at an international conference hosted by IISc "India is incredibly dependent on its climate, which has till now varied very little, steering the country in between famine and flood to yield good productivity," as reported by TNN. He added that "We can't expect this to remain the same in the coming years as global warming will definitely have an impact. So India is very vulnerable to global warming."

It was noted that around 15 percent of manmade carbon dioxide globally comes from cars, trucks, ships, airplanes and other vehicles. Hence, experts were of the opinion that reducing emissions is one of the most essential steps in combating global warming.  Prof John Polak of Imperial College said "We have to re-align academic creativity to address the urgent problems of cities which further lead to climate change. The current infrastructure, like the centralized traffic management, present in most of our cities is ideas of the past generation. We need to look at cities using new approaches," reported the TNN.

IISc professor TG Sitharam was quoted saying "Heavy infrastructure like building flyovers, underpasses is the vision of the last century, which had many drawbacks such as resource wastage, being car-centric, expensive and unsustainable. The need of the hour is soft infrastructure which emphasizes on bicycle sharing, car sharing and intelligent transport systems," as reported by TNN.

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