NEW DELHI: Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio visited Delhi last week for an interview on climate change with environmentalist Sunita Narain after which he was taken to Kheladi village in Mewat district of Haryana. Reports said DiCaprio was here to profile Narain for a documentary. He also visited Taj Mahal with his mother.

“We wanted Leonardo to see the impact of unseasonal weather on farmers of our country. In Kheladi village, he saw acres of productive farmland that were still underwater because of extreme rain in mid-September. Farmers said that they did not know if this was climate change, but they told him that their experience of over 50 years in farming told them that there was something new and catastrophic afoot,” said a statement by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

The actor wanted to understand Narain and CSE’s perspectives on climate change and discuss how the world should work together on it. “We discussed that the world needs an ambitious agreement on climate change. But this cannot happen unless we are willing to discuss the issue of consumption and lifestyle,” added the CSE statement.

“In these villages, Leonardo saw women cooking using cow dung and firewood. Even in households which had LPG connections gas was expensive to use, so women continued to cook using these polluting sources. We discussed the issues of energy poverty and how renewable energy could be the way ahead, but only if the world accepted that it needed to provide funds to make the transition,” the statement said.