New Delhi : US Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, lauded the US-India Climate Partnership while pressing a strong case for preserving the planet, which he said is 'crying' demanding attention towards its needs.
Addressing the SAWIE Leadership Summit on Monday, Garcetti said that Planet Earth is reminding the humans of her needs.
"Our planet will continue to remind us of her needs. Our planet is crying out for us to listen and to take care of each other.
To not become more atomized but to become more connected. To figure out not the ways and the things that divide us, which seems to be increasingly sometimes what our politics are about, but to remind ourselves of the humanity that connects us with ourselves and the planet that sustains us," he said at the event.
He further emphasised that the India-US partnership is the "most resilient relationship" in the world and is growing from "administration to administration to party to party."
"It's (relationship between India-US) the most resilient relationship in the world and it is growing from administration to administration to party to party... Since the late '90s, we've been building a model for why we have diplomacy, why our people engage with each other and why crossing oceans in this Indo-Pacific is so critical, not just to the survival of our people and our countries, but to this world," he said.
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The US envoy said that peace, prosperity, planet, and people were the four Ps to be paid attention to for attaining sustainability. On a witty note, he also gave Hindi terminologies of the wordings.
"So, I came up with these four P's...I'm giving a series of four speeches that started with peace, prosperity, planet, and our people. I won't go into the other three today, but peace is everything from our defence partnership to human rights and civil, values and things that preserve the peace. Prosperity is our economic work and our technology driven work of our critical emerging technologies.
Our people are the cornerstone of everything we do [like] our educational exchanges, putting cricket into the Olympics, looking at ways that we can share and understand our culture. But this level describes the work that we do that ignores borders, those things, whether it's health pandemics and health work that we do, or the climate crisis, that really is about our planet above all else," Garcetti said.
He added, "So those four P's which are also kind of four S's in Hindi, so shanti, samriddhi, swasth, which is really health, the health of our planet and our people and subdefining the s in Hindi maybe logon ki sajehdari which is a kind of a people partnership. Those are the four S's."
Garcetti said that the summit highlighted the challenges to preserve the planet. Citing the devastation caused by Covid pandemic, the Ambassador stressed the need to work for the environment.
"Today I really want to focus on our planet because it is the cradle of our health and everything that we do stems from that. This summit highlights an essential truth that preserving our planet requires us to face challenges that really know no boundaries. Climate change, public health threats, the demand for sustainable energy, I would offer are the biggest threats that we have lived through in recent history," the US envoy said.
He added, "Think about the trauma of the COVID pandemic and what our children will live through. Because every child today, in the same way that some of us, when we were growing up, feared nuclear annihilation knows unlike that, which might happen that climate damage is happening and they fear their future."