Every drop of water is precious in western Rajasthan. This sun-baked swathe of arid land is dotted with ‘dhanis’, or small settlements comprising of 50-100 people and a few thousand of their domesticated animals. Remote villages such as Kisangarh and Girduwala, located close to the India-Pakistan border are a part of the Thar desert ecosystem, characterized by sandy plain and dune landscape interspersed with grasses and hardy bushes such as ‘aakdo’ and ‘thor’. This region receives less than 100-200 mm rainfall in a good year and depends solely on groundwater for sustenance.
Women herding goats in Girduwala. Photo by Namrata Ginoya/WRI India
To achieve a sustainable future, the world clearly has two priorities that must come before all others. The first is to ensure that all citizens have access to the means of satisfying their basic needs. The second is to evolve practices that bring the environmental resource base on which their lives and future integrally depend, back to its full health and potential productivity. To achieve these two primary goals requires urgent action on two fronts. We must immediately get the public, governments and the international community to commit to:
At this summer’s Oxford University Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) Digital Dialogues , a conversation between top scientists in the field took a deeper dive into the opportunities and hazards of NbS to address climate change. This timely conversation highlighted how we as policy makers, corporate leaders, environmentalists and the general public gravitate towards simple solutions and prefer to adopt cures that require the least of us. The conversation also shone a light on the danger of assuming that climate change can be addressed with NbS and without decarbonization of the world’s economy. A video of the dialogue can be found here and the 90-minute investment of time is well worth it for those seeking a deeper knowledge of the issue, the possibilities and the challenges.
