Climate Action (Water & ENERGY)
Land and water support all life on earth. Our communities, wherever they may be settled, depend on both to carry out the activities of daily life, to look after their homes, to take care of cattle and livestock and to irrigate their fields. Healthy landscapes and water systems are essential if we are to secure livelihoods and wellbeing of future generations and our environment.
With 97% of the total water available on earth being in oceans and another 2% in glaciers, we are left with only about 1% of fresh water for usage. It is therefore, a challenge and necessity to conserve fresh water. True to the fact many of our program locations face this challenge having water table as low as 500 feet below the ground level mainly because of unchecked withdrawal for agricultural purposes. Therefore we work both on water harvesting and on water usage with the neighboring communities. We are expanding our partnerships with Institutions like NABARD to scale-up the program intensifying at locations and adding on new geographies. The program also aims at checking fast soil erosion in the program areas.
SOIL & WATER CONSERVATION PROGRAMS
- Water harvesting projects
- Micro-irrigation projects
The challenge concerning the energy is not only an industrial issue but the rural population also faces the same equally. Be it depleting fuel wood resources for cooking or erratic power supply at homes. They get to struggle with the challenge day in and day out. Coupled with this are the health and environmental challenges that we face in the form of smoke that comes out of millions of wood-burning stoves. Moreover energy conservation is equally important to mitigate the climate changes and its consequences.
Burning fuel such as coal, oil and biomass remains the principle energy source in rural and traditional sectors and contributes a third of India’s energy. The incomplete combustion of biomass is one of the main source of indoor air pollution which is directly or indirectly contributing to greenhouse gases.
We address these challenges in a multi pronged fashion. Promotion of non-conventional and renewable energy is one of the important pillars of our programme. We promote solar home lighting equipment, solar lanterns, solar street lights and fuel efficient stoves. Dung based bio-gas plants are also being endorsed. All this is to reduce emission of greenhouse gases and help our nation to move towards a low-carbon society.
DBF’s energy conservation and climate change initiative is trying to address the need of energy in a sustainable way through the use of renewable resources. Under the initiative, DBF is working closely with the local community to change mindsets and replace the traditional source for energy with clean energy.
Energy conservation and climate change initiative projects classifications
- Clean cooking projects
- Clean lightning projects