The recent catastrophic flash floods in Nepal is directly linked to decades of an engineering mindset which assumed that rivers and mountains could be re-engineered at will, environmentalist Sunita Narain said on Wednesday.
Narain, the director general of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based think tank, said hydroelectric plants are being built back to back in the Himalayas and “what you are seeing today is the revenge of nature.”
She was speaking at the inaugural session of the eighth International Conference on Sustainability Education, organised by the NGO Mobius Foundation.
According to CSE analysis of the India Meteorological Department data, she said, an extreme weather event occurs in India roughly once a day.
“Nature is telling us that the way we have been doing development clearly is not going to work in future,” she said.
Narain recommended rethinking and reinventing the solution to impacts of climate change and environment-related issues.
“The one thing we do not need more of is more reports and more incremental steps to fix what is today an existential crisis,” she said.
Citing Delhi pollution as an example, the environmentalist remarked that a few electric vehicles cannot fix the issue.
“Delhi’s air can be fixed only by completely reinventing the way we move, so that we can move without cars… (This) means an incredible augmentation of the public transport system so that we can walk, we can cycle, take a paratransit, take a metro, or take a bus,” she said.
-PTI
