Amity organized Indo-Canadian Workshop on Economics of Environment

New Delhi: Amity School of Earth and Environmental Sciences has organized one day Indo – Canadian workshop on the topic “Economics of Environmental Resources” to understand the linkages between money and intangible benefits of common property resources like forest, groundwater, flood plains etc. Resource persons from Canada Prof. Rohit Jindal and Dr. Mamta Vardhan impart theoretical knowledge among motivated students followed by field based experiments to calculate carbon of different tree in the campus and their conversion into monetary terms that can be traded. A new idea has been out to provide incentive to stockholders helping reducing climate change by maintaining natural vegetation; a win win approach where a stockholder can receive money not for cutting tree but for maintaining the tree and forest. 60 selected students and faculty members participated theworkshop; which was organized in interactive mode. On a very conservative assessment, it was found that each tree in University campus may offer Rs.3300 of carbon stock. Faculty members Dr. Shruti Dutta, Dr. Puja Singh, Dr. Meenal S and Dr. Suddepand Dr. Parveen contributed significantly for organizing the workshop.
In his inaugural address Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof. PadmakaliBanarjee emphasized the need of innovation to device economic tools to provide incentive for natural resources, which in fact the effective way to tackle pollution and climate change. Dr. KushagraRajendra, convener of workshop remarked that reducing carbon emission is only possible solution and ‘cap and trade’ can be potential way to achieve it by mutual trade between two parties having higher emission and lower emission by providing incentive to later one for their carbon offset. Carbon market offers lucrative market in countries like India, where per capita carbon emission is much lower (1.7t per annum) than developed countries or even global average (5t per annum) which will help to ease out issue of investment in green technology for sustainable development.