Abstract:

Although climate change affects all people, the poor are the most vulnerable because of their dependence of their livelihoods on climate sensitive natural resources and their weak social protection structures. As about one fourth people in India are still below poverty line, climate change will deepen poverty and make poverty eradication a challenging issue here.

COP14 has already realized the long term co-operative action on mitigation, adaptation, technology and finance. But it is high time Government of India immediately put forward some concrete community based solutions through various government and non-government sectors as a part of climate resilient activity. The most profound impacts of climate change in India will be in agriculture and food security, water resources, water induced disasters, biodiversity changes and human health. Increasing the resilience of communities to cope with climate change demands some effective strategies in state or national level and practical implementation and integration of those strategies in India’s long term development plans. Practising policy through the implementation of different projects, encouraging vulnerable communities to take part in decision making processes on climate related adaptation strategies, revising climate change policy to enable local-level action, continuous monitoring and analysis of predicted climate change by agriculture, energy, health and water departments of government and empowerment of community to prepare themselves for climate-induced hazards should be focused at the moment.

All the work on developing climate resilient strategies will be of little value unless developed countries heavily cut green house gas emissions within the next few years. Thus, good homework needs to be done by government of India for COP15 too.

[This paper was presented in the 4^th Student Round-table Conference at National Law Institute University, Bhopal (November 21, 2009)]

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