"Climate Healers" Combat Global Climate Change
California Non-Profit Project Promotes Global Reforestation
Nov 13, 2008
If 1/6th of the ice-free land area on Earth is reforested, global carbon dioxide emissions will become a negative number. This seems like a rather lofty goal, but it is becoming closer to reality with the creation of Climate Healers, a non-profit California corporation working on a grass roots solution to global climate change.
Dr. Shailesh Rao heads up Climate Healers. He serves as Executive Director of San Jose-based “The Lighting Project”, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving energy efficiency of lighting systems in low-income neighborhoods throughout the world. But now, he is busy promoting a unique project that serves to empower the poor in India while helping them save money, curb carbon emissions and help ease global warming, the chief cause of climate change.
How Climate Healers Works
Climate Healers partners with remote villagers and other non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that are currently off the electrical grid to focus on reforestation efforts. Rao’s organization provides these groups with renewable energy technology and resources to help them become net negative carbon emitters. According to Rao, these are true ‘Climate Healers’, and to celebrate their commitment, pictures are taken of the recipients and stories are published on the Climate Healers Web site as well as being rewarded appropriately with renewable technologies, such as cell phones.
The ultimate goals of the organization are to reforest over 6 billion acres of land, while restoring biodiversity and addressing global climate change, promoting sustainable living and creating social networking links between both affluent and poor communities across the world.
The project is partnering with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) and is being deployed in two villages - Hadagoudi in Orissa and Karech in Rajasthan, where FES has been working with the villagers for several years on reforestation and ecological restoration. This project recognizes that the use of wood for fuel is a major contributor to worldwide deforestation and carbon emissions, as 1.5 billion tons of wood is collected and burnt annually for cooking, and that in order to persuade people to switch to solar cooking instead of wood, they need to be compensated. The project uses a carbon offset mechanism, and the patronage of the environmentally aware, affluent community to fund this change in behavior among the poor.
The project is focused on rural communities who can help with reforestation of open public lands, and will not be deploying solar cookers in urban areas or city slums.
The villagers of Karech have protected more than 700 acres of forest near the village since 2002, but had been using other forestland for grazing cattle and for procuring wood for cooking. Since 2006, the cattle in the village are being stall-fed as the protected forest area is yielding roughly 20 tons of nutritious grass per acre per year, which the villagers harvest once a year.
Rao’s Inspiration to Create Climate Healers
In Sheila Bhatt's August 2008 interview with Dr. Rao in India Abroad, Dr Rao completed his postgraduate work at New York State University in Buffalo and also earned a PhD from Stanford. As an engineer, he was involved in the creation of new communications technologies. He was, among other things, responsible for developing the world’s first single chip real-time MPEG video encoder, the IEEE 100BASET2 Ethernet standard, and the IEEE Gigabit Ethernet on Copper (1000BASE-T) standard; currently deployed in millions of computers worldwide. This was before he saw Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. It was then that Rao had an epiphany, and knew his passion would veer away from engineering and toward solving the problem of global warming.
 |
 |
