Sunita Narain is committed and at once visionary and down-to-earth. She speaks fast and eloquently. All these qualities are important in her work as head of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based organisation with some 100 employees. The CSE engages in lobbying and legal action, focusing on environmental and democracy issues, with the aim of enhancing public awareness and influencing politicians. Narain herself refers to ‘knowledge-based activism’.She recently visited Sweden to evaluate a possible future Mistra research programme in global water conservation. Until the Board of Mistra takes a final decision, she is not allowed to go into details about the project.
Extreme crisis
But she asserts that growing competition for cultivable land is one of the key global issues, and says that ‘the world is facing an extraordinary crisis’. Rising demand for biofuels means that a growing acreage of cultivable land is being used for purposes other than food production. This development will hit developing countries and the world’s poor particularly hard.
Sunita Narain says: ‘The beginning of climate change is happening in front of our eyes. You thus have a double whammy. On one hand people are hit by increasing food prices and competition for land. On the other hand the food that you are growing is also under threat because of climate change.’
Narain sees no prospect of major technological advances being able to resolve these complex global challenges. Instead, as she sees it, solutions must come in the political arena.
‘This is an area where the world will have to take very careful and quick decisions. We can’t wait beyond the point for research to be done ten years after.’
Rapid decisions
But the decision-making of today must be developed so that rapid decisions can be taken without compromising scientific validity. The problem is not primarily about decision-making at local level; rather, it’s a matter of shortcomings at supranational and global level,’ Narain points out. She cites the EU biofuels initiative as an example of what not to do.
‘The EU’s very quick and ill-researched move to provide subsidies and a policy framework for bioenergy is poorly considered in terms of implications, both in terms of food security and also in terms of reducing emissions.’
To bring about prompt decisions that are nonetheless correct in the long term there must, according to Sunita Narain, be concerted efforts by the various institutions of the international community: politicians, the UN, researchers and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This also means that researchers are required to join forces in order to attain results.
‘We have to build institutional structures capable of complex research. And it’s critical for the research to be timely and relevant, to become part of the policy discourse.’
Campaigns
The CSE has engaged successfully in this kind of debate since it was founded in 1980. With its research-based information and vigorous campaigns the organisation contributed, for example, to the decision to convert buses in the city of Delhi to compressed natural gas (CNG), which they have have been running for eight years now. The CSE is now pursuing the issue of air pollution further by running a campaign for the city’s vehicles to be entirely replaced by public transport. After a legal battle against American beverages giants a few years ago, the CSE succeeded in tightening up Indian requirements concerning the quality of water in beverages. And in 2005 the CSE and Sunita Narain were awarded the Stockholm Water Prize for their work of helping Indian villagers deal with the severe shortage of clean water by harvesting rainwater.
Narain, who has seen how knowledge and information can be used to exert influence on society in her homeland, India, is optimistic about the state of the world as well. She is convinced that information and knowledge will, in the long term, result in better political decisions and solutions to the daunting challenges of our day.
‘I think human beings are very sensitive. But it is a challlenge for all of us in the research field to put the best information out so that humans can take better-informed decisions.’
