In its bid to reduce carbon emissions in the city, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has constituted a Climate Action Cell, comprising experts in the field and representatives of concerned organisations, which met for the first time on Thursday to decide the city’s strategy to achieve carbon neutrality.
The civic body has formed an executive committee and working group under the dedicated cell. It expressed the need to prepare a Climate Action Plan for which a greenhouse gas emission inventory is needed and carbon emissions have to be measured.
The dedicated cell will prepare short-term and long-term targets for achieving carbon neutrality in Pune, besides organising public awareness plans and programmes, national and international-level programmes on climate change, making partnership agreements with various organisations to work jointly on the matter, and raising funds for implementation of the programmes.
Additional municipal commissioner Kunal Khemnar urged all members of the cell to collect as much information as possible from various sources on climate change and propose programmes to the PMC under its climate action plan. “We should work on reducing carbon emission and also focus on creating awareness in educational institutes and among citizens,” he said.
PMC environment officer Mangesh Dighe said it would help the civic body to regularly submit reports on the portals of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, Carbon Disclosure Project, International Council for Local Environment Initiatives and C40 cities’ group.
Activist Vaishali Patkar, who represents the CCP Environment Foundation and is a member of the Climate Action Cell of the PMC, made a presentation on the civic body’s initiative.
