Why sustainability?

Thank you Sheetal. One of the biggest talking points when it comes to sustainability is “Why
Sustainability?” and what does it have in for us.

If continued human race survival, good environment, stable economic and political balance isn’t a
sufficient enough reason, then I don’t believe anything is enough.

Sustainability most often is assumed to be limited to preservation of natural resources, but that is
far from the truth. Sustainability includes social progress and equality, ensuring no individual is
deprived of any fundamental rights. It also includes environment preservation, stable economic
growth, bridging the massive wealth disparity seen in today’s time wherein top 10% of households
hold over 70% of the wealth.

Knowing all this, some might still say, that Hey! I get sustainability is important, but is it worth
adapting when extra money is going out of my pocket and I have no discernable result/impact that
I can see.

To that I say, Hey!, yes it is most essential even if you have to take a pay cut. Recent climate change
adversaries, rising pollution in Delhi/NCR and its devasting impacts, unnatural weather patterns,
rising carbon footprints through transportation, have put the whole planet on a brink of collapse,
and with 1 MIT report suggesting that we may already be beyond the point of full return, and it
ends up costing us 10x times more.

This year, the country already saw the possible impacts of dependency on fossil fuels, with coal
reserves left worth only 1 day in some plants leading to massive energy cut, seeing such incidents
happen more frequently, there is utmost need for switching to alt energy generation methods,
predominantly and most effectively Nuclear and solar energy. With increasing tech and higher
energy density, potential for solar energy is on the rise especially in the tropical climates like India,
and with safer nuclear projects like TerraPower backed by Bill Gates, it opens up a wide opportunity
for switching.

As is said, Prevention is better than cure and, in this case, if things go out of hand, then there might
be no effective cure.

Thank you and I would like to pass on to my friend Garvit now.