JAMMU — Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday said climate response has become a “compulsion” for Jammu and Kashmir, stressing the need for a structured and institutional approach to address climate change.
Replying to the discussion on Demands for Grants in the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, Abdullah said last year’s extreme weather events including, heavy rains and drought-related losses made it clear that climate change can no longer be treated as a peripheral issue.
He also called for assigning responsibility for climate change to a specific department, saying no department currently has a defined mandate to conduct a comprehensive exercise on the issue.
“If seen from one perspective, climate response has become a compulsion for us. Just look at last year — the damage caused by heavy rains and the losses due to drought. How we adapt our budgeting process to address climate change is an important question,” he said.
The chief minister informed the House that a climate mitigation fund has already been created, with a dedicated corpus placed in it. However, he stressed that before introducing a full-fledged climate budget, the government must first institutionalise responsibility and conduct a scientific assessment of climate impacts in the Union Territory.
“In my view, before even framing a climate budget, we should assign a department the responsibility to study what climate change means for J-K and how its impacts can be reduced,” Abdullah said, adding that targeted budgetary interventions would follow once institutional mechanisms are in place.
The remarks came in the context of suggestions made by CPI(M) legislator M Y Tarigami, who has been advocating a separate climate budget for Jammu and Kashmir, citing the region’s ecological fragility and vulnerability to adverse climatic conditions.
Tarigami has urged the government to treat climate change as a governance priority and allocate dedicated resources for mitigation and adaptation measures. — (PTI)