Environmentalise Marshall Plan

Context: Pandemic and rising climate disaster events call governments to devise the Marshall Plan on climate action.

Importance of climate action

• Rising climate disaster events: 2021 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) study shows that 2020 set a new annual record of 22 weather/climate disaster events, breaking the previous record of 16 events that occurred in 2011 and 2017.
  • India is predicted to shoulder a quarter of the global suffering produced by climate change.
• Economic potential of climate action: Marketplace for climate solutions is already worth over $1 trillion, and investment is expected to increase to $23 trillion in emerging markets by 2030.

Challenges to climate action:

• Imperative of poverty: The Centre or young states like Meghalaya have the imperative of lifting millions out of poverty into the middle class, knowing fully well that the path that turbocharged developed economies into the high-growth orbit is the very same that is leading them to their own ‘extinction’.

Way forward: Central and state government should devise the Marshall Plan on climate action.

• Institutionalised, public and incentivised approach: To power economic concepts based on conservation activities, sustainable livelihoods and green action.
  • This ‘institutionalisation framework’ has to springboard from the government sector.
  • It has to be treated as a national and economic priority, at least for, and by, states with a high climate-risk profile in India.
• Government shall assume the role of a ‘demo and R&D farm’: Collecting and sandboxing innovative solutions and scaling them effectively to ensure timely interventions. For E.g. Meghalaya has various innovations like
  • Experimenting with algae to cleaning up toxic rivers and harvesting it as the new staple for a bioeconomy,
  • Deploying AI in creating a new, detailed bio-diversity heat map and conserving it.
  • To generate a new market category of livelihoods based on conservation activities or robust carbon sequestration markets and products.
• Building mini-grids by generating electricity out of orange peels, recycling and building premium value chains out of forest produce, and curating new sustainable and native agroforestry models.

• Find innovative ways to low carbon economy: More innovative ways towards a low-carbon economy comprises carbon farming mandates, legal personhood and human rights status to nature and innovating tools of climate finance.