'Environment degradation can be caused due to poverty, not necessarily greed': India at UN

While participating in the UN Security Council High-Level open debate on 'Maintenance of international peace and security: Humanitarian Effects of Environmental Degradation and Peace and Security' on Thursday, India warned against securitisation of environmental issues and said that connecting environmental degradation to peace and security collective will not enhance the effort to address climate change issues.

India opined that environmental degradation can be caused due to a range of factors and separated poverty from greed by saying that environmental degradation may not be necessarily be caused due to greed but could also be due to poverty and people living at subsistence level.

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"Environmental degradation affects not just the ecosystem but also the people who depend and live on it. It is also a multi-dimensional issue. To begin with, it can be caused by those who live on it due to a range of inter-related factors, foremost amongst which is poverty and not necessarily greed. In many developing countries, such problems arise from issues related to people living at subsistence level," India said in a statement.

"Environmental degradation can have a humanitarian impact or effect just as many other aspects of human activity have humanitarian dimensions. However, merely to link up everything related to environmental issues with peace and security does nothing to enhance our understanding of the problem; does nothing to help us address these issues in a meaningful way, and does nothing to call out the real perpetrators and make them adhere to their commitments on environmental issues or help change the behaviour of people at subsistence level," the statement said.

In a powerful message, India strongly put forward the measures Indian Government has taken be it in terms of restoring back degraded and deforested lands by means of plantation and aforestation, or by abolishing single-use plastic, or promoting the use of renewable energy. India strongly opined that merely shirking responsibility under various conventions will not help, but the conviction to act on the commitments is the need of the hour.  

In many other cases, the perpetrators of environmental degradation may well be outside national boundaries while the people suffering are inside, India opined.

"What we need is a collective will to address such important issues multi-dimensionally without shirking our respective commitments under the various important conventions, inter alia, UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Convention on Biological Diversity, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and Paris Agreement etc. What we need therefore is greater resolve to implement the commitments and contributions undertaken under environmental agreements instead of 'securitisation' of environmental issues," it said.

"Going forward, India aims to restore 26 million hectares of degraded and deforested land and achieve land-degradation neutrality by 2030. We have set additional targets of eliminating single-use plastic by 2022 and installing 450 GW of renewable energy by 2030," the statement said.

"Let us view environmental degradation as an opportunity to strengthen multilateralism and seek equitable and inclusive solutions to build a greener, cleaner and a sustainable world," it further said.

(With inputs from ANI, Image credit: AP)

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