Many people in Irkutsk have an extremely bleak prospect ahead of them this winter. This woman will not survive -18° C temperatures without a lot of help from her neighbours. This seems pretty urgent.
You could develop the economy at the same time as solving the everyday practical problems the people face. A friend of mine, Helena Norberg-Hodge has been working on these ideas for over forty years in Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region with a climate that is similar, though not quite as extreme in terms of temperature variations as that in Irkutsk. See Learning from Ladakh and The Power of Sun.
There are many, many things that can be done to make great improvements in people's lives at very little expense, because they are basically providing them with information and training. What we need to do is to dramatically scale-up the sharing of the results of this research and development. These ideas should also be the basis for assisting displaced people in Syria and elsewhere. We are going to need to get very, very good at managing crises like this, very soon, so we should grab any such learning opportunities with both hands whenever we spot them.
I would add that agricultural land restoration is a huge potential carbon sink which would probably allow us to continue with more efficient fossil fuel use, and we could ultimately have a useful level of sustainable fossil fuel use as a result of careful land management. Agricultural land restoration is also the solution to the flooding in Irkutsk Oblast. See Russian Government is Clearly NOT Taking Climate Change Seriously. The flooding in Spain and Southern France is very likely also a result of degraded agricultural land, and poor land management.
You could develop the economy at the same time as solving the everyday practical problems the people face. A friend of mine, Helena Norberg-Hodge has been working on these ideas for over forty years in Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region with a climate that is similar, though not quite as extreme in terms of temperature variations as that in Irkutsk. See Learning from Ladakh and The Power of Sun.
There are many, many things that can be done to make great improvements in people's lives at very little expense, because they are basically providing them with information and training. What we need to do is to dramatically scale-up the sharing of the results of this research and development. These ideas should also be the basis for assisting displaced people in Syria and elsewhere. We are going to need to get very, very good at managing crises like this, very soon, so we should grab any such learning opportunities with both hands whenever we spot them.
I would add that agricultural land restoration is a huge potential carbon sink which would probably allow us to continue with more efficient fossil fuel use, and we could ultimately have a useful level of sustainable fossil fuel use as a result of careful land management. Agricultural land restoration is also the solution to the flooding in Irkutsk Oblast. See Russian Government is Clearly NOT Taking Climate Change Seriously. The flooding in Spain and Southern France is very likely also a result of degraded agricultural land, and poor land management.
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