Garden of Sustainable Living

The oldest attendee at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos that concluded recently was 92-year-old broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough.


He told the gathering "The Garden of Eden is no more". This verdict of Sir Attenborough on the destruction inflicted by humanity on the natural world meant that we cannot even dream of the good times. He sketched the unprecedented damage to the biodiversity and historic loss of the natural resources with point of no return.


Sir Attenborough however, offered hope. He said that we humans are a "problem-solving species", but he reiterated that we have just a decade to solve climate change. That forecast of his was based on the IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) special report on 1.5 deg cent.


Indeed the technologies to mitigate climate change are available and most of them are accessible. Same however, cannot be said about affordability of these alternate technologies. The technologies need to be upgraded fast and made more efficient to reduce the costs so that change is accelerated to meet the urgency stipulated by IPCC.


There is one community, one group of institution and one sector of technology that could take the challenge of Climate Change head on. Not only it would do the job in the time limit set by IPCC but can also open the gates to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) agreed by all the countries in the world.


That community is youth, that group of institutions is Universities, and the sector is digital technologies. Each of them working hand-in-hand has transformed the world that we saw a decade back, now beyond the recognition. That is the key driving force for TERRE Policy Centre's project of Smart Campus Cloud Network (SCCN) to work with youth in the University campuses by using the digital technologies like IoT, AI , Big Data and Cloud Networking.


SCCN now has more than 60 university campuses (see: sccnhub.com), latest to enter was IIM-Ahmedabad a prime management institute of global status.


SCCN has conviction that The Eden Garden is no more, but Garden of Sustainable Living surely will be reality.