GS-1: Urbanization, their problems and their remedies
GS-2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation
Climate Action by Cities
Context: Recently, Maharashtra’s Environment Minister announced that 43 cities across the State will join the UN-backed ‘Race to Zero’ global campaign, which aims to create jobs while meeting goals of climate change and sustainable development.
Are cities doing enough?
Out of 53 Indian cities with a population of over one million, approximately half of these cities have a climate resilience plan in place. Of these, 18 cities have moved towards implementation.
These numbers highlight an encouraging first step, signalling that recurrent experiences of floods, water scarcity, cyclones and storm surges are being taken up into urban development policy.
Ahmedabad has had a Heat Action Plan (HAP) since 2010 and its success evident from reduced heat mortality.
Combining infrastructural interventions (for example, painting roofs white) and behavioural aspects (building public awareness on managing heat), the model has now been scaled up to 17 cities across the country.
Other successful projects include nature-based solutions such as mangrove restoration in coastal Tamil Nadu and urban wetland management (regulate urban floods) in Bengaluru.
Bottlenecks and ways forward
However, a lot of interventions are being implemented through sectoral projects focusing on particular, isolated risks. This narrow focus tends to overlook how multiple risks converge and reinforce each other — for example, seasonal cycles of flooding and water scarcity in Chennai.
Coastal flooding, sea-level rise, and cyclones are discussed less often despite India’s long coastline and highly vulnerable coastal cities and infrastructure.
Inadequate finances and political will at city scales constrain developing sustainable Indian cities.
Inadequate institutional capacity in existing government departments to reorient ways of working.
Way Ahead
Moving away from looking at risks in isolation and planning for multiple, intersecting risks.
Government needs to undertake long-term planning with resilience planners in every line department as well as communication channels across departments to enable vertical and horizontal knowledge sharing.
Focusing on changing behaviours and lifestyles. One emerging example behavioural change is bottom-up sustainable practices such as urban farming where citizens are interpreting sustainability at a local and personal scale. This can mean
Growing one’s own food on terraces and simultaneously enhancing local biodiversity;
Composting organic waste and reducing landfill pressure;
Sharing farm produce with a neighbour,
Bringing communities closer and creating awareness about food growing.
