Glasgow, Nov 2 (IANS): India has been joined by the UK, Australia, Fiji, Jamaica, and Mauritius at the COP26 to launch the Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS), a dedicated initiative to provide technical support on the multifaceted issues posed by infrastructure systems and promote disaster and climate resilience of infrastructure assets.
IRIS is co-created by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) - launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2019 - for working with the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to identify opportunities for partnerships and technical collaborations to strengthen infrastructure systems for resilient development in these countries.
Modi, along with his counterparts Boris Johnson (UK), Scott Morrison (Australia), Frank Bainimarama (Fiji), Andrew Holness (Jamaica), and Pravind Kumar Jugnauth (Mauritius) launched the IRIS at The World Leaders Summit at the annual climate change conference COP26 that started on Sunday.
The world leaders have gathered at the Glasgow COP to negotiate climate actions to reduce emissions for keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial era. The small island states are the most vulnerable as the sea level rise - one of the most prominent impacts of climate change predicted by Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their latest report - will be a fatal blow for them.
After explaining why there was a need to have such a platform, Modi announced that the Indian space agency, ISRO, will build a special data window for SIDS. "With this, SIDS will continue to receive timely information about cyclones, coral-reef monitoring, coast-line monitoring, etc. through satellite."
Stating that although SIDS countries have lived in harmony with nature for centuries, and have the know-how to adapt to the natural cycles, he said: "But due to the selfish behaviour shown in the past several decades, the unnatural form of nature has come to the fore, the result of which innocent Small Island States are facing today."
Such countries depend a lot on tourism, but due to natural calamities, even tourists are afraid to come there as these countries face the biggest threat from climate change. "The disasters caused by climate change can literally take the form of catastrophe for them and wipe out decades of progress. It is a major challenge not only for the security of their lives, but also for their economies," he said and called IRIS as the "most sensitive responsibility of human welfare".
The CDRI is a partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and knowledge institutions that aims to promote the resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks in support of sustainable development. CDRI promotes rapid development of resilient infrastructure to respond to the Sustainable Development Goals' imperatives of expanding universal access to basic services, enabling prosperity and decent work.