Blue Water Operations With A Green Footprint:
Indian Navy has adopted a comprehensive ‘Indian Navy Environment Conservation Roadmap (INECR)’ for synergising the aim of ‘Blue Water Operations with a Green Footprint’
- Some of the noteworthy initiatives towards ‘Clean and Green Navy’ are
- Indian Navy commissioned one of its largest solar plant with a capacity of 3MW at Indian Naval Academy (INA), Ezhimala in July 2020.
- Another 2MW solar power plant was installed at Naval Station Karanja, Mumbai in July 2020. With this, the overall installed solar plant capacity at Naval Stations is 11 MW.
- The installation of SPVs are in line with Navy’s objective of fulfilling Govt of India’s ‘Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM)’ mission.
- Further, viability of setting up urban forests concepts such as Miyawaki forests is being emphasised to match the theme of World Environment Day 2021- ‘Ecosystem Restoration’
- Miyawaki is a technique pioneered by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki (born 1928), that helps build dense, native forests.
- The approach is supposed to ensure that plant growth is 10 times faster and the resulting plantation is 30 times denser than usual.
- It involves planting dozens of native species in the same area, and making them maintenance-free after the first three years.
- In July 2020, Union Environment Minister inaugurated a unique urban forest at the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) in New Delhi.
- This would be a dense urban forest with multiple tree layers including 12000 saplings of 59 indigenous species in another year or so.
- The Miyawaki method of forest creation is employed.
