India’s Rural Development Ministry has decided to try to tackle two problems at the same time: Youth unemployment and bad air quality.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.treehugger.com
This is a fantastic story to tell at the closing of the World Climate Summit. The concept of employing up to 300,000 youths to plant a billion trees is a great story in itself. Combating both pollution and unemployment.
What is really compelling is the study in this brief story that shows that tree leaves absorb a lot of the combustive and brake pollutants that come from vehicles driving past. These are of course carcinogenic air pollutants and for someone who has cancer, that’s music to my heart.
Such a simple thing (perhaps not logistically) but this single initiative will reduce unemployment, improve India’s citizens’ health, reduce the impacts of pollution and climate change and give the economy a boost.
What if each country did something similar instead of committing to a ‘name and shame’ of countries that don’t actually commit to combating climate change. If a country creates an atmosphere of smog and pollution the rest of the world will point their fingers at them and say “naughty country”. That’s showing the world!
I wonder how much carbon footprint the world leaders and their entourages generated getting to Climate Change Summit in Paris? Maybe they would have been better off just staying home and each planting a tree.
Anyway, kudos to India for a great initiative.
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