Towards a Climate-smart Covid-19 Recovery
This has been a year of unsurmountable loss for all of us – several have lost our health, our dear ones, our belongings, our livelihoods and our peace of mind, to a pandemic and a series of natural disasters.
September 28, 2021
This has been a year of unsurmountable loss for all of us – several have lost our health, our dear ones, our belongings, our livelihoods and our peace of mind, to a pandemic and a series of natural disasters.
In these challenging times, we wish continued health, safety and peace to all our readers, patrons, partners and friends.
In the run up to one of the most important UN climate change summits, the Conference of the Parties (COP) 26, we recognize that we are faced with the twin challenges of climate change and COVID-19. That’s not all, studies have shown that climate change could trigger similar vector-borne and other diseases in the future, if we don’t act swiftly and prudently.
In the face of such challenges, we are grateful to all those who are directly and indirectly upholding our planet’s wellbeing, even if it means putting their own lives at risk. We thank our conservancy workers, farmers, health workers, grass-root organizations working closely with vulnerable communities, scientists, medics, environmentalists and every individual who has been striving incessantly for the past months, to make the world better for us. We also thank the writers and journalists’ communities for their constant efforts to report from the field, present facts and bring correct information to the people.
Particularly, WRI India is immensely thankful to our freelance writers Basudev Mahapatra, Disha Shetty, Rosemary Marandi and Shweta Thakur Nanda; video filmmaker Hridayesh Joshi and videographer Rizwan Khan and video editor Amrit Raj, for their courage and diligence in contributing to this project despite the spread of Covid-19, the ensuing lockdown across states, and several other personal and professional challenges. We thank Soumya Sarkar, the consulting editor for this project.
We have launched a special series Climate-smart Covid-19 Recovery. Over the next few weeks, we will bring stories, films and blogs by our contributors from urban and rural areas, that will showcase the people’s fight against the twin-threat of COVID-19 and climate change. The stories will also highlight how several local communities across social and economic background have been responding to these threats by employing climate-smart survival strategies.
We hope you find our stories worthwhile and encourage your feedback. For comments, you can write to us at nitya.kaushik@wri.org.
