Asserting that it was unfair to compare ‘Queen of hills’ to Cape Town owing to recent water crisis, noted environmentalist Sunita Narain on Wednesday urged the government and people to not to let Shimla become another Cape Town.

Narain who is also the Director General of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), however, expressed satisfaction over the preservation of water catchment area of the state capital Shimla.

“There was the need for protecting other water catchment areas as trees and not the schemes would be able to the meet the water requirement of Shimla,” she said while addressing the lecture series on Climate change with her lecture “We 4 Climate” series.

Narain said the climate change is not phenomena about future but it should be tackle now and action should be taken to curb its effects.

“India has already started experiencing extreme weather conditions as frequency of dust storms have increased and several places are experiencing excessive rains in short duration,” she said.

So far, around 500 people had died in 50 dust storms in the country during the period from April to mid June this year. It is the result of western disturbances changing course and becoming more and more erratic and unstable.

These western disturbances which were usually experienced from December to February in the country are now stretching upto June, she said.

She quoted the example of Chandigarh wherein the city was flooded in 2017 as it received 40 percent of its annual rainfall in just 48 hours. The occurrence of extreme rains in short duration is resulting in floods and draughts in the country.

“The climate change is a global problem which can be solved only if all the nations come together and act in unison for taking steps to reduce carbon emission.

Further, right policy decisions are required for affordable, inclusive and sustainable growth as causing pollution,” she said, adding cleansing of pollution in later stages becomes an expensive proposition.

She termed plastic waste and solid waste management as major challenges and said every individual must become partner in segregating the non-biodegradable waste from degradable waste.

Further, the biodegradable waste should be converted into compost as dumping the waste in landfills is no longer feasible and no land is left for it.