Climate funds may cool heels of big bosses but can they cool the climate.



Global climate change is a man made activity and without peoples participation the restoration of carbon balance is impossible. On one hand the aspirations of hitherto not so developed countries are vying with each other to achieve the developmental process equal to the rich nations which will certainly entail huge pressure on existing resources of the global earth and produce enormous strain on the climate by way of pollutants generated by developmental activities. Once the youth achieves any level of development he shuns the villages and agriculture and moves to the city for employment generating more pollution. Once I questioned in the village 200 km from Delhi why there is so poor development . An old fellow replied all the educated youth have migrated to the city and those who get jobs in administration hardly look towards the villages. Global scenario is not much different. Agriculture has got new hope via agroenergy farming as I would prefer to call.



The worries Mr Bill Gates has expressed are even more complex with rich nations loosing their money and health care and global earth still getting warmer and warmer. In my openion all programmes which are not having peoples participation and direct lab to land approach shall end up in consuming grants with no returns. Once there is no accountability for the funds pouring which are many a times utilized for making AC room for offices and officers a fleet of vehicles and hardly 15 percent of the wealth or with another estimate only 5 percent of the wealth of the rich nations or Mr Bill Gates trickles down to the cause for which it is doled out.



An army of NGOs , Government and non government functionaries and battery of UN bodies have failed to deliver  the message as well as  meaningful contents for restoration of climate. Once a meeting of Global level was held in Jaipur some time ago involving all the big and high with investment of over 30 million rupees on wetlands inviting scientists and activists globally but when it came to implementation only an impartial assessment and soul searching can provide if a single penny of mind and effort was really spent on Ramsar sites and saving the wetlands though the conference had many positive projections of methods and technologies.

Unless grassroot level involvement is there in saving the climate doling out big money will yield no results. If we pay attention to saving what already exists in the forests and fields it will serve immediate cause for generation of carbon credits on one hand rather than raising forests which is impossible in certain agro-climatic conditions. Experts sitting in close environs of UN in Zurich or Rome cant solve the problems on global warming unless local expertise, local participation and peoples involvement is there . This can only happen with proper education and delivering the message and not money.









Climate funds are a worry for Bill Gates

NEW DELHI: Global warming has the world's richest man very worried, but for a different reason.















Bill Gates, who has now taken to full time philanthropy, is worried that financial commitments being made by rich donor countries for climate change could come at the cost of life-saving healthcare projects.



Gates, the Microsoft Corporation co-founder, is now devoting all his time as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is seriously worried about the amount of spending pledged at December's Copenhagen climate summit.



In an exclusive interview to TOI from New York, Gates said the final statement of the Copenhagen summit talked about mobilising $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three-quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.



"I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1% of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases," he said.



"With an additional pledge for global warming, the budget of rich countries will be out of balance and they will look to cut down on expenditure. What donor nations must understand is that health has a direct impact on climate change," he added.



"While in southern India, population growth is modest, it's not so in northern India. In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment," Gates said.



"Population control has a direct link with education, economy and jobs. However, the good thing is that most of India's money used on healthcare projects comes from within the government. India should actually look to further increase its contribution to the health sector," he added.



Gates singled out Italy and blasted it for cutting down on funding. "Italy was at the low end of European givers even before the Berlusconi government came in and cut the aid by over half, making them uniquely stingy among European donors. These cuts will show up in Italy's 2009 aid figures. In June, I met PM Berlusconi personally to make the case for more support, but I was unsuccessful. This is a huge disappointment since I still think the Italian public wants to be as generous as people in other countries."



According to Gates, the best way to measure aid generosity is to look at it as a percentage of GDP. The most generous countries -- Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Luxembourg -- give 0.72%-1% of GDP to foreign aid, "which is phenomenal".



According to Forbes magazine, Gates was the richest man in the world in 2009 with an estimated fortune of $40 billion.





Source:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Clima...