MY SECOND DAY AT THE YOUTH FORUM

Haripriya Madhavan, India

October 2, 2010. This was the day when I realised that I could have been a better geography student in my class 8.

The second day was packed with a lot of technical presentations providing data and statistics on a variety of topics like satellite and sensor types, remote sensing applications, impacts of climate change on the Himalayan glaciers, glacial lake study and GLOF risk assessment. We also learnt technical terms like swath, geostationary orbits, bandwidth combinations, resolution, etc.
The hands-on exercise was pretty exciting to explore through. As we sat in groups of three sharing a computer, we tried working on MODIS snow tool for removing clouds from available images to distinguish snow cover on the peaks. In another exercise we had to try out different bandwidth combinations to identify the best picture that would clearly let us differentiate vegetation, urban settlements and water bodies in the satellite image that was given to us. When I told my friends about this over facebook, they were quite surprised that I was learning about remote sensing tools. (I guess they were jealous, too!) All these concepts are really new to me, but they are very interesting to learn.

One of the motives of the forum, as Tek Jung Mahat puts it, is to encourage climate advocacy based on good science and to make information reliable. In every session, the necessity to share information was reiterated by the speakers. I too think that is the best thing to do because that is when there will be collective action. Without the right interventions at the right time to combat climate change, we can definitely not expect a bright future for us as well as our generations to come. So, now is the time to remember the adage that we have not inherited this planet from our ancestors, but borrowed it from our future generations.