< Previous | Contents | Next >
♤ “National Mission on Sustainable Habitat” seeks to promote sustainability of habitats through improvements in energy efficiency in buildings, urban planning, improved management of solid and liquid waste, modal shift towards public transport and conservation through appropriate changes in legal and regulatory framework.
♤ It also seeks to improve ability of habitats to adapt to climate change by improving resilience of infrastructure, community based disaster management and measures for improving advance warning systems for extreme weather events.
♤ It will broadly cover the following aspects:
♤ Extension of the energy conservation building code - which addresses the design of new and large
commercial buildings to optimize their energy demand;
♤ Better urban planning and modal shift to public transport - make long term transport plans to facilitate the growth of medium and small cities in such a way that ensures efficient and convenient public transport;
♤ Recycling of material and urban waste management - a special area of focus will be development of technology for producing power form waste.
♤ The National Mission will include a major R&D programme, focusing on bio-chemical conversion, waste water use, sewage utilization and recycling options.
Do you know?
A rainforest is a forested biome with high annual rainfall. Tropical rainforests arise due to the inter-tropical convergence zone. The largest tropical rainforests exist in the Amazon basin, Nicaragua, equatorial Africa, southeastern Asia from Myanmar to Indonesia, eastern Queensland and part of Australia.
The beneficial effects of rain forests are manifold. It is also called “lungs of the world” and act as major consumers of atmospheric carbon and play a large role in cooling air.
It is estimated that the rainforests were reduced by about 58,000 km2 annually in the 1990s. Rainforests used to cover 14% of the Earth’s surface. This percentage is now down to 6% and it is estimated by study that the remaining natural rainforests could disappear within 40 years.
22.4.4. NATIONAL WATER MISSION (NWM) MISSION OBJECTIVES
♤ Ensuring integrated water resource management for conservation of water, minimization of wastage and equitable distribution both across and within states.
♤ Developing a framework for optimum water use through increase in water use efficiency by 20% through regulatory mechanisms with differential entitlements and pricing, taking the National Water Policy (NWP) into consideration.
♤ Ensuring that a considerable share of water needs of urban areas is met through recycling of waste water.
♤ Meeting water requirements of coastal cities (with inadequate alternative sources of water) through the adoption of new and appropriate technologies such as low-temperature desalination technologies allowing use of ocean water.
♤ Revisiting NWP to ensure basin-level management strategies to deal with variability in rainfall and river flows due to climate change, including enhancement of storage both above and below ground, implementation of rainwater harvesting and establishment of equitable and efficient management structures.
♤ Developing new regulatory structures to optimize efficiency of existing irrigation systems, to rehabilitate run-down systems and to expand irrigation to increase storage capacity.
♤ Promotion of water-neutral and water-positive technologies through the design of a proper incentive
structure combined with recharging of underground water sources and adoption of large-scale irrigation programme based on efficient methods of irrigation.
Do you know?
1. The 2009 State of the Environment Report by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) clubs the issues under five key main challenges faced by India, which are climate change, food, security, water security, energy security and managing urbanization.
2. Mercury in the environment can be reduced by using alternative products that don’t contain mercury, cleaning up spills properly, recycling mer-cury-containing products and properly handling and disposing of mercury-containing equipment.