By IANS,
New Delhi : In a first of its kind initiative, all 40 top officials of the Gujarat government Friday attended here a crash course on climate change on the directive of Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
The two-day course, which will also examine the impact of climate change and policies to meet the challenge, opened at The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI).
“Global terrorism and global warming are two major threats to mankind. I have brought all my top officers to learn about climate change and implement policies at the ground level,” Modi said after inaugurating the workshop.
“As a state with a coastline of over 1,400 km, we take climate change seriously and have initiated many schemes to counter it,” he said.
Modi also said that the state would soon ask all builders to install water-harvesting facilities before building any complex.
Modi declared that Gujarat would become a destination of investment for renewable energy industry, especially in the field of large-scale solar power plants, solar powered drying, large-scale wind farms, power generation from urban waste and plantation for production of bio energy.
As part of the orientation course, the officers will attend several lectures by eminent environmentalists like Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman R.K. Pachauri and former environment secretary Prodipto Ghosh.
On the occasion, Gujarat and TERI signed an agreement to work jointly on missions specific to the state identified in National Action Plan on Climate Change in various fields.