Tamil Nadu to launch school Environment Clubs and frame Climate Change education policy to boost ecological awareness
Chennai: Environment Clubs would be started in all schools and an exclusive policy on Climate Change education would soon be framed as the government had decided to turn environmental studies into a movement mainly because awareness on ecological protection could be created among all sections of society only through students, Chief Minister M K Stalin said on Tuesday.
Inaugurating the Tamil Nadu Climate Summit – 3.0, organized by the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Forests, at the World Trade Centre in Nandambakkam, Stalin said his government had planned to impart knowledge on Climate Change through school curriculum since education would be the cornerstone for realizing all its future dreams.
Stressing on the need to create environmental awareness to enable the society to gain knowledge on the issue and to develop the resilience to overcome disasters brought about by its degradation, he listed out a few major natural disasters that the world had faced in recent time due to climate change.
Attributing the floods in Dubai, China, Brazil, Germany and Spain, the forest fire in Los Angeles, heat waves in tropical countries and the landslides in both the neighbouring State of Kerala at Wayanad and within Tamil Nadu, though a minor one, at Tiruvannamalai, to climate change, he said assessing the intensity of the disasters was essential to overcome such inevitable catastrophes.
It was to face such effects of climate change, awareness was pertinent and it would be created by developing the skills to overcome them in all government employees, particularly those in the agriculture and water resources departments that were prone to bear the brunt of it more, he said, adding that ways and means would be found to reduce the spewing of greenhouse gases
Already the government had declared heat wave as a State disaster through a notification and announced a relief of Rs 4 lakh for victims of heat wave and creating facilities for using the State Disaster Management Fund for supply of Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) and for setting up water pandals for enabling people to quench their thirst, he said.
The State government had been treating economic development and the responsibility to protect the environment as two eyes and was making every initiative bearing that in mind and reinforcing the commitment to renovation of water bodies, protect the biodiversity and developing environmentally sustainable cities.
The conference was organized to not only address future environmental concerns and plan solutions in advance but also proclaim to the world what the State was doing on that front, he said.
