Four Indian Green Initiatives To Get UNFCC Awards At Lima

Trash2Cash is a revolutionary initiative taken up by the South Asian Forum for Environment, an independent community enterprise led by people who live in the slums and are trained and paid to collect and recycle corporate and household waste. Thus the organic waste is diverted from landfills to make compost, while paper waste is recycled and used for making handicrafts in a workshop run by women.

In this manner, the organization collected an average of 1,000 kg of waste paper and 2,000 kg of organic or food waste each month. Also, the slum dwellers involved in this initiative helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 520 metric tons a year.

Bhungroo is another initiative in Gujarat to deal with drought in the region. It is a water management system that injects and stores excess rainwater underground and uses it in dry spells. This initiative of artificially recharging the aquifers also helps reduce salt deposits, besides increasing the supply of fresh water. Some 18,000 marginal farmers have benefited from this initiative. The Gujarat Ecological Commission has implicated the same in other parts of the state as well. Not just here, based on the results in Gujarat, the initiative has been implicated in parts of Africa as well.

The other two projects which will be awarded in Lima are efforts to reduce energy consumption in real time by using technology, thereby helping industrial and commercial users to reduce carbon emissions, and a community-based early flood warning system in the Himalayan region to help improve the resilience of 45 vulnerable communities. These projects are also known as Lighthouse initiatives which can be scaled up and replicated in places which requires such efforts.

Also Read: 'U.S. Committed To Assist India In Military Modernization'
Union Carbide Should Face Indian Courts Over Bhopal Disaster: Survey