At COP27, We Must Find a Better Way to Reduce our Carbon Footprint

Published in The Indian Express

Nov 4, 2022

Representational image by Pixabay

To address climate change effectively, we can’t focus exclusively on carbon — we need to integrate water management into our actions

Momentum is building for the Conference of Parties (COP), where world leaders plan, deliberate upon, and engage to fulfil their commitments and plans. COP27 is set begin in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt on November 6, 2022. Given our inability to reduce fossil fuel use fast enough to avert the climate crisis, much of the actual action has ended up being on “carbon offset schemes”, that allow individuals and companies to balance out their own carbon footprints by investing in environmental projects around the world, primarily through large-scale tree-planting. Trees sequester carbon by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transform it into biomass through photosynthesis.

But one crucial factor is often missing from these conversations — the question of where the water to sustain all this tree-planting will come from.

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Acknowledgements

Veena Srinivasan and Anuja Malhotra for The Indian Express.

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At COP27, We Must Find a Better Way to Reduce our Carbon Footprint

To address climate change effectively, we can’t focus exclusively on carbon — we need to integrate water management into our actions

Acknowledgements

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