CREATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR ‘PRESERVE AND USE’ OF LIVING NATURAL RESOURCE

This on line site is one of its kind - a comprehensive site on urban natural resource It details and maps areas of great living natural resource value and equips the citizen to understand and evaluate them. It gives new, creative, perennial and non invasive solutions to secure the water, air and forest of cities, worth billion of ‘dollars’ per year. All these resources could last forever but once lost are lost forever.

According to the UN Millenium report, we have taken out a third of the planet’s species and close to half of the planet’s living natural resources in just 40 years. The loss of such natural resource, which were created over aeons of evolution is immediate and irreversible and much of climate change is due to this loss. Natural resource is tangible and on the ground – it is felt immediately. Natural resource loss has yet to come to the fore in the climate debate and to be clearly  seen for what it is on the early warning radar.

Indeed, for the huge populations in the  developing world it is  the rapid loss of living natural resource which will be more critical than climate change. We know that just the loss of forests accounts for almost a quarter of climate change in terms of sequestered carbon but what of the loss from the lack of good water and the transport of such a vital element over large distance, the loss of nutrients in soil , dust and pollution of the city air where more and more people gather - and the health costs this will bring? The surest way to avoid climate change on the ground, then, is to preserve such natural resource.

This site provides a ground reality answer to climate change and reforming our scheme of living to preserve and use such natural resource. It has a

Knowledge section which gives creative solutions to preserve and use natural resources non-invasively. It explains the resource and sets economic value on it. It will equip citizens to have a knowledge base to start working on preservation. It has material which has been published in reputed journals on Delhi’s natural resources.


The Visual knowledge section is more in the public domain. It has films and videoclips on the ridge and the floodplains. It has power points on Integral Heritage – which treats natural and built heritage on an equal and complimentary footing. It has power points on how to put these issues into a political agenda and in an educational setting.

The MAPS section is a detailed ground level mapping of  two major resources, the Ridge Forest and the Yamuna River Floodplain using Google Earth maps with a tool for computing area on the screen itself The maps are of

1.  The Delhi Ridge
2.  The Yamuna Floodplain in Delhi

In the light of the violation of the protected areas of great natural resource value, this equips citizens, schools , colleges, foundations, organizations and individuals to mark out an area of this invaluable resources they can adopt for protection from pollution and encroachments. This also puts on record the status on the ground that cannot be disputed by people, courts or government.

Though this site and its ‘preserve and use’ solutions are made for the Delhi region it would be of great value to use it as a template for other cities and districts on the planet. It is the one way – preserve and use this resource- to secure a sustainable future for the cities and their citizens.