State environment secretary RPS Kahlon said the final draft plan had almost been prepared and was now to be submitted. "After the submission of the final draft plan, the Centre will decide which funding agency, be it the World Bank or Asian Development Bank (ADB), to approach for executing the projects," Kahlon said.
The environment department has been working on preparing the final draft of the state action plan on climate change for quite some time. All other states, too, are preparing similar drafts for submission to the Centre. All the drafts will then be compared and contrasted to form an integrated plan for the country.
The Bengal plan will emphasize particularly on two most ecologically vulnerable areas - the Sunderbans mangrove forests in the coastal belt and the glacier belt in the Himalayan range. The Sunderbans has the world's largest tidal halophytic mangrove forests with 60% of it in Bangladesh and the remaining in West Bengal. According to environment activists, the mangrove forest was being seriously affected due to increasing global warming and climate change.
Also, the glaciers of the Himalayas are very vulnerable to climate change. Scientists have been constantly warning about how global warming and climate change could hit the glaciers badly. The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI) headed by RK Pachauri, who also heads the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change ( IPCC), will soon submit its report to the Mamata Banerjee government on the impact of climate change on Bengal's coastal and hill areas. Read the full report here.
Source: Suman Chakraborti, TNN, Kolkata.
