With breakthroughs and new inventions in Medical Science, Covid-19 may be short-lived, but climate change is here to stay. Climate change has been an existential crisis and would pose more severe threat to humankind, opined experts here.
“We need to act on it sooner than later as climate variability and extreme weather events have become more frequent,” said visiting Professor of School of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, Prof UC Mohanty.
All it needs is more focus should be on building climate and disaster resilient villages and preparing resilient cities, so that people will survive future threats like Coronavirus pandemic, added Prof Mohanty.
Dr Mohanty was speaking at the virtual dialogue, Is climate change anything to do with COVID-19?
A national webinar on Climate Change, Environmentalism and Covid-19 was organised by city based Focus Odisha Foundation in collaboration with Covid 19-Civil Society Initiative, Mahashakti Foundation and Migration Watch India.
In his keynote address, CEO of New Delhi based Research Organization i-FOREST Chandra Bhushan underlined the need for a strategic and cautious approach at both policy and community level to protect and conserve the environment, ecology and biodiversity.
He further added that because of massive deforestation, changing eating habits of humans to consume more exotic foods and intensive destruction of natural resources we are witnessing massive spread and outbreak of virus and bacteria related diseases.
“That’s ostensibly the reason zoonotic and novel virus spread, though during the last twenty years we have experienced frequent outbreak of swine flu, Bird Flu, SARS, Ebola etc. Covid-19 has become more serious with its spread of both in length and breadth,” Bhushan added.
“Even though, there is no scientific evidence or study to relate climate change with Covid pandemic, but circumstantial reality shows, there is an intrinsic relationship and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has time and again warned about serious health hazards due to changing climate”, stated Bhushan.
Former bureaucrat and State resource person for Competitive Commission of India Pradip K Biswal stressed the need for policy and plan integration of ecological aspects and emerging climate challenges.
Director of Focus Odisha Foundation and moderator of the virtual event Sudarshan Chhotoray described both climate change and Covid-19 as two sides of a coin and said that human interference with nature was coming to haunt us.