State Action Plan on climate change by April

The Orissa government is likely to finalize the State Action Plan (SAP) on climate change by the end of April 2010.

The Department for International Development (DFID) of the UK Government and the World Bank officials, who are helping the state government in formulation of the action plan, have already held discussions with the stakeholders including the state officials in this regard.

At the latest round of discussions held with the state officials on the matter on Friday, the DFID and World Bank officials have suggested the setting up of nine sectoral committees that would work on nine different impact areas of climate change.

These areas included health and social vulnerability, energy, transport, agriculture, urban development, water resources, coastal and disaster, mining and forest among others.

The committees would be headed by the secretaries of the respective departments. Meanwhile, the government has notified the appointment of conveners for these committees. Different departments have been asked to nominate the nodal officers, sources added.

“We have asked the concerned departments to nominate their nodal officers to work with the conveners of different cluster groups for formulation of the State Action Plan (SAP)”, Bhagirathi Behera, director, environment department of Orissa government told Business Standard.

Simultaneously, the time line for various activities pertaining to the formulation of SAP has been agreed upon in a meeting with the representatives of DFID and World Bank.

The DFID team was headed by Virendra Sharma and the World Bank team was headed by Ranjana Mukherjee.

As per the time line agreed upon, in the first week of March this year, the first sectoral meeting would be held to carry forward the process. The second sectoral meet would be held in the third week of March.

A high-level meeting under the chairmanship of the chief secretary is to be held in the second half of March and the final state action plan would be finalized by end of April, sources added.