The following was submitted by Sustainable Orillia. This is the third of four articles about how people in other parts of the world see climate change. These articles will run each Saturday.
With ravaging forest fires across Canada and other natural disasters here and around the globe, climate change is something Canadians are hearing a lot about these days. But are ordinary people in other countries hearing and thinking about it in the same way? How are they feeling about the threat of a changing climate? Do they care?
Sustainable Orillia reached out to people in Denmark, Brazil, India and Canada on what they, and people in their circles, are thinking, feeling and doing about climate change in their various corners of the world.
We asked each of them to respond to three questions:
- Are people in your circle concerned about climate change?
- How do you personally perceive climate change?
- What’s happening in your community? (Are there specific changes being made in response to the threats posed by climate change? Have you personally made any changes?)
The first article in this series featured Ellen Larsen of Denmark. In the second article in the series Fernanda de Custodio, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, weighed in. This third article features Ranjan Solomon of India.
India’s current rapid industrialization and advancing technology are bringing it unprecedented economic prosperity. But this rapid growth comes with an ecological cost – India has the third heaviest ecological footprint in the world, and its resource use is double its ecological capacity.
In spite of India having the world’s largest human population, it has a lighter individual ecological footprint when compared with other countries. This is largely due to India’s network of thousands of largely self-reliant villages and minimal use of natural resources, consumer goods, food, clothing, space and energy, as well as minimal waste generation.
India’s participation will be instrumental in addressing the threat of climate change, so the Global West will need to listen and address its concerns, including demands that the West pay for adaptations required by Third World countries.
Ranjan Solomon lives in Goa, a tiny state on the west coast of India, where he is retired from a career in an international NGO.
His responses to our questions included reference to a research article written by a team of Goa academics titled: “Impact of Climate Change-Induced Rainfall on the Agriculture Pattern of Goa – A Geographical Perspective.”
The article states: “Climate change is not only affecting farmers, government officials, politicians, and lawmakers but also every citizen of the country … Though agriculture is the backbone of the State’s economy, which provides a source of livelihood to the majority of Goan people, it is now rapidly declining due to physical as well as cultural factors…Farmers, academicians, scientists, and politicians of the State think that there is an impact of climate change and global warming on Goan agriculture… like floods and landslides.”
Our questions and his answers follow.
How do most people in your circle, where you live, view the threat of climate change?
Ranjan: “There is a lot of indifference on the whole. The language of climate change is not popular. It has to be broken down into simple issues and existential questions. For example, people understand best when you talk about water scarcity. Ponds drying up. Trees dying out. Crops failing. Flooding. Storms and cyclones. Consistent power failures. In other words, climate change is about immediate questions that hurt livelihoods.”
How do you perceive the threats of climate change, personally?
Ranjan: “I, personally, tend to ignore the language. The language is elitist and makes no sense to common people. Our politicians are disinterested and think of the next election where, in India, climate change is a non-issue. We are not the west who have actually created the problem by parcelling off high polluting industries to the Global South and demand standards from the Global South.
If climate change must be controlled, the West must change its consumption patterns, produce locally and stop abusing our environments. It is contemptuous for the West to even talk about climate change having started the problem in the first place.”
What changes, if any, have you made in your own life in response to the threats of climate change?
Ranjan: “In my own life, I tell people about how the Global South is exploited and why we must boycott western products and markets. I call out the hypocrisy of the west and their double standards. I believe in a SKILL INDIA where we are self-reliant, do not buy western armaments that keep the embers of war going only to meet the needs of the western military industrial complex. Climate change is not about new weather patterns. It is about a just world order.”
How are people in other parts of the world responding to climate change? How do their responses compare with those of Orillia citizens? Watch for the fourth and final perspective in this series of articles, from Canada (Orillia), appearing next Saturday.
