 a challenging task in terms of time management. So without much ado, we have a remarkable panel of people here, so maybe request each of you to take two minutes to make your comments, observations, and we can go around quickly and that will leave us hopefully a little time for some open discussions as well. We have a list of panelists on this session. So if I could request Bitu Segel to kick it off and let me quickly give out the list so you can prepare your thoughts as well. Bitu and then Devi Goenka, Geetam Tiwari. Thank you. Two minutes. Three minutes. Three minutes? Wonderful. We have an earth in which you can divide into two. It's a biosphere and the technosphere. My problem right now, Surnik, is that I see human ambition expanding the technosphere, but I don't see any science that can do this without eating the biosphere. So if we continue to look for 10%, 9%, 8%, GDP growth, et cetera, I want someone to come up and suggest that irrespective of all the magic that we promise that it won't eat into my glaciers, it won't eat into my corals, it won't eat into my wetlands, it won't eat into my deserts. Imagine deserts. We don't want them green, we want them as deserts. So I don't see how this magic is going to take place. I believe that evolution has suggested to us and climate change is the hammer with which it's telling us this. The purpose of life is not growth. The purpose of life is equilibrium. The longest-lived species have lived on a platform. The moment they peaked, you found deaths taking place. Now that's one part of the picture. There are so many solutions that are being offered. I'd like us to take a humility pill if we will. There is something, there's a term now called biomimicry. It's the latest buzzword. I'd like the economists first to take this on. Nature has its own economy and nature has its problems and nature has solved its problems. When you get cut on your hand, you can put an antibiotic because it makes you feel good, but at the end of the day, that cell and that cell are joining together and they're making it okay and that's what climate change solution is tomorrow. The ecosystems that we so undervalue, which we dispense with, Mrs. Dixit, you want, say, a dam so you drown the valley, not you. You want a mine so you take away neomgyri. If you continue on this basis, you are basically saying that neomgyri's only value is the bauxite on its plateau. Now that, I think, is a gross error. It's just as much an error as to say, I've got two kidneys, so why don't I sell one? Okay, you might sell one if you want to save your father, perhaps, but do you want to sell one because you want to have an extra single mold? I think that's the mistake that we're making and I believe that we are embarked on the ultimate adventure. It's called intergenerational colonization. When we requested the British to leave India, it was geographic colonization and perhaps chronological. This chronological colonization right now, I take money from the World Bank and I tell my kids, you pay it back. I think that's the lightest part of it, the heaviest part of it will be the air that they cannot breathe, the water they cannot drink, the soils that won't produce food, the temperatures which your utterly brilliant presentation taught us so simply, which they won't be able to live with their entire lives. They'll be spending just wondering, how are we gonna stay alive? I've got so many more. Two minutes, not possible, but nature is the ultimate public distribution system. I'd like the social activists who sit in this room to understand that. There's a legislation called the Forest Rights Act that has just been passed, but not yet been cleared. It offers to privatize forests by giving them a way to maybe up to a million, two million, 10 million, 20 million, we haven't even done the census. At the end of that, what's going to happen is, there's an Indian phrase, narahe baas na bhajai baasuri. These forests are the mechanisms by which climate change is to be arrested. The people who these forests have been given away to have always had community rights, which they should have, but individual rights, we're going to have a bloodbath. The mechanism is like giving away the lifeboat when the Titanic is about to hit the iceberg. It's not the fault of those people being gifted that ecosystem, the forests. So Nick has told us what these forests mean to us. They're 18 to 20% of our solution. It's like going into an ICU and pulling out the tubes and saying, look, that person there hasn't had a cup of coffee since yesterday, give it to him, you know? The patient's going to die. So I don't think any longer we have the luxury, first of all, of fighting. Personally, speaking for myself, I run a magazine called Sanctuary. I've more or less given up on people in this room. I now work with 12-year-olds. First of all, they don't curse me so much. Second of all, I find that there's a naive belief they have that if they do the right thing, it'll actually work. Bitwankal, Bitwankal, I met the Prime Minister, I actually gave him this. Now don't worry, the tiger will be saved. Now that kind of thing, I think the cynicism in this room is what's likely to drown us, but I think that like your wound that heals, I think all of us, so Nick, we have to trust that nature knows how to actually moderate its climate. It's been trying to do that. All we're doing is overwhelming it. Thank you. Hi, Bitwankal. I thought you were colonizing the UK just now, but I may be wrong. I have a three-second message, actually. If climate change is going to affect Mumbai, which it already has begun, the three-second message for all Mumbai girls is head for the hills. Because the way things are going, Mumbai, which started off with seven islands 300 years ago, is probably going to go back to seven islands 30, 40 years down the line. And when people talk about spending $50 billion in Mumbai over the next 10 years, I really wonder whose money they're talking about, and $50 billion of investment for what? When we talk about building underground metros at $80 million per kilometer in Mumbai city, I wonder who's going to pay for it. And I wonder whether these metros are going to have submarine capabilities, because probably we'll need to have that kind of system in place 20 years down the line. I have one also very important point to make. If you want to solve the problems of cities, you have to talk about solving the problems in the rural hinterland. If you offer free housing to people who encroach inside the cities, then you can't complain about slums and the fact that you can't tackle some problem. The moment you offer somebody to come and encroach into your city, a very heavy incentive for the encroachment, you can't say, look, this is a problem I can't solve because there is no end to that problem. The government of India has huge investments planned for rural areas. The delivery mechanism just don't work. There's corruption at every level and maybe 5% of the money intended for rural development actually reaches this thing, intended beneficiary. So those are issues that we actually need to look at very, very seriously because all these problems are interlinked. And as far as the Forest Rights Act is concerned, I just want to add two things to what Bittu has said. There are win-win solutions possible. We have solutions which will benefit the tribals and save the forest and tackle climate change. It's based on a very simple logic of per capita emissions quota. And my request to Nick is next time he makes a presentation, I think he should proudly say that India has one ton and not leave it as the last kind of thing. But I think India's one ton is something that America and everybody else has to try and achieve. And in the interregnum, because somebody else is using up our carbon quotas, I think we are entitled to ask those people to compensate us for that. And ideally I would like to see a rich family in the West paying 10,000 rupees a month to a poor tribal family in India for just protecting the forest. Because that is what one hectare of forest is worth today. With today's carbon prices, 10,000 rupees a month, ma'am, is what a poor tribal in India will get if you have a carbon trade mechanism which works from family to family. And these are really win-win solutions that occur to all of us. I also want to talk about a coastal regulation zone, mangroves and so on. This is something that actually Mrs. Indira Gandhi started off in 1981. She wanted the coastline of India protected. And that was actually a very far looking vision because when she talked about protecting 500 meters of India's coastline from development, when we got the CRZ notification, when we were helping draft it in 1988, we talked about not allowing development activities within 500 meters of the high tide line. And one of the reasons for that was climate change concerns is there in the notification. For 20 years, the government of India has done nothing to enforce the notification. It is in fact trying to dilute it and scrap it. And my appeal to everybody would be that these are issues that we need to fight for. We can't talk about destroying mangroves around Mumbai to put up sewage and other infrastructure projects. We have to talk about actually strengthening our natural defenses and our physical defenses. I think these are all priorities for our city. I don't think I really, I mean, I can go on and on, but I think as long as we have a situation where people who should be protecting our green spaces and our open areas are actually responsible for destroying them, if the chief minister of our state as minister for urban development is clearing project after project, which is destroying the greenery in the city and allowing builders to put up huge kind of thing without any matching infrastructure, then I think we have a major problem ahead. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ravi. Gita. Well, I'd like to relate a lot of issues that we have discussed yesterday. And now today we have started talking about climate change in the context of urban age. Let's put it that way. And taking on from that, in fact, a list of issues that Mrs. Dixit shared with us, and she is in fact my chief minister and we're all very proud of it. And I think she is considered one of the most forward-looking leaders and forward-looking chief ministers in our country. But this is where the challenge of climate change and challenge of urbanization comes because the list of green policies that we have adopted in Delhi, in fact, the complexity is that they are not green ultimately. They don't remain green ultimately. For example, first is that Delhi has been awarded Green City Award because it has 100% fleet on compressed natural gas. In 2001, when the Supreme Court mandated that we should have complete fleet on compressed natural gas, there was, you know, there was a lot of disruption initially because the system was not ready for it. So people using public transport were in fact penalized. The ultimate effect, and we've been monitoring it since 2001, has been that up to 2003, the number of buses in Delhi, in fact, have reduced. If you reduce your fleet, your ultimate number of users in public transport goes down. And because we have very high ownership of two-wheelers, those people start using two-wheelers. So ultimately, your CO2 emissions increase despite having CNG fleet in Delhi. Second, in fact, I think you know that now we are facing the challenge in Delhi, it is green versus red. The number one problem in Delhi system, and it is not alone to Delhi. I think this is becoming universal in all cities in India and also the cities that we visited in other countries. It is the major public health concern. Number of people are most productive age group dying in traffic accidents. And all scientific understanding shows that it is in fact our policies which are resulting into this. The way we are designing our roads, the way the kind of systems, the investments we are doing, grade separated junctions, wider roads, express ways inside the cities. This is huge, huge investment, which is going, any transport urban development project, actually your largest budget is in transport. And this transport is actually creating not just the climate change. I mean, that is another issue at all altogether. You invest more in express ways, you invest more in widening roads and you have more cars. If you have more cars, the correlation is very simple, you have more CO2 emissions. But on the other hand, what we see because in our cities, we are talking about captive users of bicyclists and pedestrians and public transport. Every public transport trip, every person who uses a bus or metro is a pedestrian first. If we have not thought about how will people walk along the road? How will people cross the road? Today we are killing 2000 people in Delhi and I know how concerned you have been about this in last six months and various strategies have been tried out. One very simple thing which we have to do is every single project that is on the board today and we have thousands of crores of investment plant to meet Commonwealth Games target. Every project has to be audited right now. How is it going to impact our pedestrians who are also public transport users? Because more people you have as pedestrians, public transport and bicyclists, these are your green modes. This is what is actually going to meet your climate change targets. So without that, we cannot solve this problem. So first, just in 30 seconds I would like to say in short term I think my appeal would be that Delhi has shown a leadership. This is yet another opportunity. We can show leadership to the whole world. We have an opportunity. We must get all projects on the board audited for how they affect pedestrians, bicyclists and public transport users. We have time to modify them. We can do it and we have done it in past. I think that is one major thing that I would like to appeal to you that we should go ahead and do it. Thank you. Thank you, Geetam. I'd like to thank Bittu, Debbie and Geetam. And before I hand off to Tony, I just want to make one quick observation. It's actually heartening to hear from the three of you a sense of pragmatism as well because as a social activist, one of the things that I feel that India lacks is a crisis of collaboration. I think we are in civil society too fragmented and tend to occupy the moral high ground without recognizing that ultimately answers come out of negotiations, negotiations between ourselves and then negotiations between us and the political system. So I think it's good to hear you coming up with practical ideas and Bittu, have a little more hope for those of us in this generation and not just the preteens. Thank you. Now we've got minus 20 minutes to in which to take questions from the audience and to have final responses from our key contributors to this session. What I'm going to do, I've been handed a number of questions which I'm going to attempt to summarize while giving credit to those who asked them. And then if I can perhaps ask you, Nicholas and Sheila Ditchard, if you can then join in at the end with your final thoughts and just embracing some of the answers to some of these questions. So Ari Ranjia of the, the Office of the Municipal Commissioner in Mumbai has asked a question which has to do with the extent to which climate change being an issue which is clearly economic as well as an ethical one, the point that Nicholas Stern's report was clearly that the approach that Nicholas Stern adopted. And the question asks or says, instead of trading carbon credits on a project to project basis under the Kyoto Protocol, why not do it on the basis of per capita greenhouse gas emissions? In short, why not allow countries that are currently low consumers per capita to receive a flow of resources from those countries which are high users in order to help them get the resources to invest in low carbon technology? Then there's a question from Jamshid Kanja. I hope I got that name right. Couldn't quite read the writing. Also a similar one from Ben Piven, who is at the Tata Institute. And this question is given the extent that rich countries have used the environment for two centuries, how will it be possible for developing countries to catch up without to some extent doing the same? And then a question from slightly different position from Bruce Raymer, who is a trustee of the Herhausen Foundation. What was the cause of global warming in past times, i.e. what ended the ice age melting the glaciers? And is this a natural cycle? So addressed probably to you Nicholas, but also perhaps to the minister. And that is the extent to which I suppose this time is different to earlier times. I think that's the question. So perhaps I can now ask our two original contributors if they could sum up not only on the basis of the three contributions we heard, but also perhaps pick up in their responses the replies to these questions from the floor. Nicholas. Thank you. Is this working? Yeah, thank you, Anthony. The... I'll use the title if you carry on. First, I'd like to express my own admiration of Mrs. Dixit's leadership in Delhi. I've been coming to Delhi now for 33 years and the change is really remarkable. And it takes strength and leadership to get there. So I salute that and thank you very much, Ms. Dixit. On the story that Bittu raised of finding an equilibrium with the world, that has to be right. And we have to do it at a speed which we're not used to acting. There is a story which my friend John Schellenhuber tells of two planets meeting in space and one planet says to the other, you don't look very well and the planet replies, yeah, it's the human race and the first planet replies, don't worry, it doesn't last very long. And we have to react in real time here. In other words, the kinds of evolutionary changes we've been used to modify our behavior in the past just happen too slowly in relation to the kind of speed of change we have now. And that's why we have to use analysis and rationality to think it through and act fast in real time. My own view is that the two greatest problems in the world are global poverty and climate change and they're very tightly linked and we have to look at them both together. And I do think that low carbon growth is possible. We can do zero carbon electricity if we have zero carbon electricity we can have zero carbon transport we can stop deforestation we can start reforestation we can be much more energy efficient than we are now particularly if we organize our lives in cities in different kinds of ways and all these things are consistent with rising living standards so I think we have to find a way to marry the growth story and the responsibility towards the environment stories and I think we can do that I say that because I think it's possible I also say that just in terms of the real politic if it becomes a horse race between growth and development on one hand and environment on the other environment will lose so we have to find a way and I do think it's not pie in the sky I do think it's possible and practical and that is the child I certainly share the ethical issues raised by Debbie Goenker and I'll come to that in response to the question on trading and I do think that moving around in cities by walking and cycling must be a big part of the story and one thing that economists are not bad at everything and one thing I think they understand a little bit about is how to use infrastructure the answer to people's increasing demand for mobility is to use the infrastructure we've got much better than we do it is not tarmac it is using roads wisely pricing for roads is one way of doing that designing them so that they are advantaging cyclists and buses is another way of doing that so I think we must not see the answer to traffic in terms of flyovers and another couple of lanes on the highway it's managing people's desire to move around not stopping them moving around helping them move around in a much easier and environmentally friendly way and public transport and cycles and walking will be a big part of that and it will be safer too I think if we do it that way I tried to build in just turning very quickly to the questions I tried to build the trading story into the analysis that I was offering I do think that the rich countries if they adopt very tough targets and I gave the kind of targets I believe they should adopt at least 75% reductions by 2050 and if we have trading in that context it will give us the kind of price of carbon that can drive real investment in zero carbon technologies particularly in poor countries so I think it's actually an efficient and an equitable way of doing it you can organize the targets in different kinds of ways I do understand the appeal the ethical appeal of given carbon budgets for everybody I think actually in terms of practical politics to point to the kinds of 75-80% targets that rich countries should take on is at the moment the most effective way of doing it because that's the language that California and France and other countries are talking it's not far away from the same kind of effect but there you get the trading gives you with the strong targets of the rich countries both the efficiency and the equity that we should be looking for will developing countries follow a different route from the rich countries in other words will they follow high hydrocarbon growth I hope they don't I hope they follow growth but I just hope they don't follow high hydrocarbon growth and they don't have to I think looking back that period may seem to be rather peculiar and what we have to do is just change our ways I think it was Sheikh Yamani who said the stone age didn't change because of a shortage of stones and I don't think we're going to stop using hydrocarbons because of shortage of hydrocarbons we have to stop using hydrocarbons just because it's far too damaging to use them and I think we can find and will find ways of growing strongly without that the causes of global change of climate change in the past there are oscillations in the sun's solar energy which do cause movements over time in the temperature of the world also there are changing particulates in the atmosphere big volcanic explosions create dirt in the atmosphere which stops the heat getting in those are the two primary sources of as it were natural oscillations and natural oscillations have occurred and do occur what we're seeing now though and if you look carefully and I'm not a physicist but if you look carefully at the physics of all this and you try to explain what we're now seeing by those natural explanations you can look at the solar oscillations of the sun you can measure the particulates in the atmosphere and you cannot explain what we're now seeing from those things and the scientists have made that absolutely crystal clear 19th century physics the physics of greenhouse gases trapping the heat it's not some new fangled science it's been made more precise over these last few years and you really can't explain what we're now seeing from the natural oscillations and we are moving into temperature the possibility of temperature increases outside the realms of human experience the dinosaurs saw 5 degrees but human beings have never seen it and we don't know how they could cope with it so those I think are the very quick paths probably not quick enough at the questions which were raised thank you very much and minister would you like to comment on what's been said since you spoke and pick up any of the other points I don't think I'd like to comment but we have learned a lot so when we meet in the afternoon we'll discuss this further because it'll require long answers thank you very much thank you very much I'll just hand over to my colleague Ramesh who is going to wind up this session thank you Tony thank you to both next turn as well as Mrs. Sheila Dixit for two remarkable presentations to kick off this discussion thanks to Tony and LSE and the urban age program to put this together it's been as Mrs. Dixit I think said very enlightening and