NEW DELHI: India's compendium of ‘Green Good Deeds’ - a list of over 500 actions prepared to motivate and involve the masses in environment protection - has got international recognition with countries like China, Russia,
Brazil and
South Africa agreeing to take this people-centric approach forward at their joint forum.
These nations as part of BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - have decided to include ‘Green Good Deeds’ in agenda of the next round of the group’s environment ministers meeting. Brazil will host the meeting in 2019. It is a mechanism to discuss and chart out their common course of action as a group during any negotiation on green issues at international forum.
The issue also caught attention of the UN body on environment during the World Environment Day on June 5 when India’s environment minister Harsh Vardhan made it a point to flag the issue in the gathering of experts and policy-makers from across the globe.
“The BRICS environment ministers’ meeting in
Durban last month agreed to include ‘Green Good Deeds’ in its agenda for the next meeting,” said the minister.
He said, “It is the ‘Green Social Responsibility’ of every citizen to preserve the environment. If each and every one of us does at least one ‘Green Good Deed’ daily as part of our Green Social Responsibility, there will be more than a billion green good deeds accomplished each day across the country.”
The compendium of ‘Green Good Deeds’ comprises of small actions which may be adopted by people in their day-to-day life to save environment. It refers to several lifestyle issues, enlisting actions such as planting trees, saving energy, water conservation, use of public transport, promoting carpool and regulating consumption patterns among others.
Such actions assume significance in view of the country's consistent pitch for addressing the ‘lifestyle’ issue at global forum, citing India’s much lower per capita carbon emission and telling the world how the rich nations have been emitting more carbon due to their extravagant consumption for years.
India had, in fact, impressed upon the nations to put “sustainable lifestyle” in the preamble of the Paris Agreement on climate change in December, 2015. Though the preamble is a non-binding paragraph of this global deal, it acknowledges the importance of the issue and recognises that the “sustainable lifestyles” and “sustainable patterns of consumption and production” play an important role in addressing climate change.