Questions from Kantonsschule Oerlikon (1)

All of us tried to identify 'climate personalities' in and around our neghbourhood and have come up with our respective climate heroes. Some of us have made a powerpoint presentation while some have a write-up of the interview we took for the people whom we felt are doing something for the climate. We have tried to upload the same here. Check with Akanksha's ppt, where she gives details of her climate hero.

A Hero is the one who believes in actions and not in mere words. He/She makes efforts to reach people and strongly believes that "Nothing is Impossible as Impossible stands for

I'm possible". He/She puts the right efforts at the right time, to get right results, which obviously would be the desired results, for the benefit of the people.

A Hero does not enter all of a sudden, but he is within ourselves. He/She is not made, but is born, and therefore his/her actions are spontaneous, not prepared! There is a hero whithin each one of us, who is striving to act. One needs to recognise Him/Her and work accordingly.

A hero is not generally supposed to be a famous person . There are many heroes in our society . It is just that you need to look out for them. I looked for a hero and found him in my community . My climate hero is Mr. Vidya Bhushan .

Mr . Vidya Bhushan is a retired assistant general manager of The Reserve Bank Of India and now spends most of his time doing social work .

He conducted THE ENWARE FEST FOR THE children of Hyderabad and Secunderabad and made the children aware of the problems faced by the environment due to human actions.

He has solar lamps installed in the house .

He also has a vermi-compost pit .

He has a rain harvesting pit.

He is actively involved in planting of trees in villages

He believes that everyone can do their bit for the environment in the following ways :

Save water by regulating it’s use while brushing , washing clothes , dishes etc

Switch of the lights whenever not needed

Walk down short distances

Plant trees in your locality.

a)The change is needed from within, that is , the mindset of the people has to change.Each one of us is a leader, and so he/she need not wait for others to lead.The start should be made from self (individual) and then towards family, neighborhood and finally reach the community. The change made by people needs to be taken into their routine but not as an outstanding effort which waits for appreciations. People should volunteer self participation.

b) In our country, the word 'hero' seems little fictious and related to fantasy. Hence we would like to coin a few words like, "Men of actions", "Eco-pals", "Climate-ambassadors", "Nature-lovers" or "Eco-endurer" instead of calling them heroes, because they think seriously about changing a devastating scenario, and act almost miraculously to bring about the positive change!

The most important change that I CAN MAKE is that I can CHANGE MYSELF. My thoughts, my views and my attitude needs to be changed first. I need to work on making my lifestye as simple as possibe. Only then can I be confident of leading others towards change, towards making their lives simple and nearer to nature...Not away from it!

Yes, our government has taken up several measures to handle climate change. Though we call ourselves a developing nation and identify that we contribute not much in terms of carbon emissions, global climate change has been taken quite seriously over here.

There are projects at national level as well as state level. However, we found that most of these are handled in terms of awareness among the general public to contribute in carbon reduction.Hence many projects are based on afforestation and reduction in use of fossil fuels.Some of the initiatives taken up in our country are listed below:

1. Establishing National Green Corps which has its branch in every state to monitor and conduct programs related to climate and environment through education and awareness campaigns. The also train educators.

2. Center for Environment Education is an apex body which also has its branches through out the country which deals with eduation and other community level prjects related to broad aspects of enironment including climate change.

3.Last September, we attended for a competetion(Project Green-i) on carbon footprint the Green Building Congress in our city which was conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industries that was mainly based on sustainabl;e development.

4. There are many NGOs which work in collaboration with the government for the betterment of the environment.

5.There is a master plan of generating Power through solar panels and contribution of the same to the power grid.This is in planning stage and we are actually waiting for it to get started.

We feel that, it does'nt matter, how much your government or its policies is doing for the environment. But it certainly matters if you as an individual are contributing your bit in reducing carbon emissions (eg. Walk for short distances, rather than using vehicles).Thus we all, the global citizens would make our respective governments look back!!!

Wow! You all are really doing a great job! Heat reuse is a unique way of reducing carbon emissions in particular!So friends, we can see climate heroes among you all there!

Coming to our school, we too are involved in various activities to reduce carbon footprint.Infact we have our eco-club named "prakriti" which means Nature. This club works under two wings:

1. "Dharani", our quarterly magazine. which means Mother earth.This is a manuscript (hand written) type of magazine which includes latest updates, articles poems , eco-art etc. that are contributed by the students.

2."Prakriti Pravas", the eco-activities that are conducted in and around the school.These include awareness campaigns in neighbouring schools, nearby traffic junction, composting etc.

This apart we have come up with an eco calender that mainly deals with cabon footprint. This calender is designed for activities on weekly,monthly and yearly basis.You can refer the attached ppt named "Prakriti-our eco club"

There is one more interesting thing that we can share. We had participated in a project called 'Green - i' which mainly focused on identifying carbon footprints in our school and proposing a solution for it. We focused on issues such as solar panels to reduce power consumption and increasing the green belt in school to increase carbon sinks.

We have also worked on designing a stove called 'good stove' which works with biomass but not fossil fuel. This biomass includes specially made briquettes made out of paper waste and dry biomass which combusts completely and avoids smoke production.

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a) If there are any creatures on this planet which can reuse carbon, in the form of carbon

di oxide, an important green house gas, they are PLANTS,particularly trees. So if we plant trees, we would be directly involved in increasing the number of these 'carbon sinks' on the planet, which inturn would reduce carbon concentrations in air.

Thus, planting trees has got to do a lot in controlling unpredicted climate change!

b) We have this person called Mr. N.Sai Bhaskar Reddy who has invented a stove called 'Good Stove' which is extremely efficient.It uses less fuel (NOT FOSSIL FUEL), produces more heat and produces no smoke. For the fuel, he has made briquettes made out of waste paper and dry biomass such as twigs, leaves etc.And for making these briquettes, he has invented a briquette maker, which squeezes the bio-waste pulp and gives it a shape. In fact Bhaskar Reddy sir has conducted a session for us and taught us how to make briquette and even the good stove.He is using these stoves extensively in rural areas of our state.He strongly believes in open source technology, and his knowledge is shared by him in the web. We can see the video clippings of his inventons, latest and previous, by visiting his blogs. All you need to do is to type 'nakka sai bhaskar reddy', or 'good stoves' or 'briquette maker' and allow your search engine to do the rest!

In the country like Swiss, people seem to be very sensitive about the issue of climate change and they seem to be taking the responsibility of contributing their bit individually. Hence our partner class probably found it difficult to name any climate heroes as such.May be because each one of them is a climate hero in his or her own way!

So our expectations from these climate heroes is just what they are into.That is , each one of them trying to simplify their life styles and thus influencing fellow citizens to use resources in a sustainable way. However, they also need involve in many local issues considering the diversity in geography,culture and ethnic values of the people over here.

Yes, this is our moment..and moment of what? Environmental crisis??? But we cant just keep blaming others and wait for things to change miraculously. So we would say this is our moment of actions. Actions against too much of consumerism and actions for waking the climate hero present within each one of us!

Perhaps we thought that we would be heroes some day! Heroes of our respective lives. And now we got a chance to become heroic children of the mother earth as well.So we are ready to think on all possible directions to protect her and make her sutainaible.

We feel there is no much difference as far as the impact of all this statistics is concerned.For whether you are a person who make up the stastics, or a policy maker, or may be even a policy breaker... or just the people....climate change is not going to spare any one!!

But there is a difference as well in terms of sensitivity towards the issue. The individuals who make up the stastistics surely know that some thing is seriously going wrong due to certain specific reasons.While the people, particularly those who know nothing about all this do usually feel that something is wrong because of unknown factors and they simply are the scapegoats.But its high time that we accept the fact that humanbeings have made scapegoats of themselves...intentionally or otherwise.

This question mostly points towards the need to understand sustainable development, so as to meet the needs of future generations.And hence the present generation needs to avoid overuse of resourses and material around us.