Mumbai's Mangroves Sacrificed For Coastal Road: Climate-Insensitive Policy Alarms Conscious Citizens

Mumbai’s summary approach to environmental concerns such as the projected cutting of thousands of mangrove trees for a coastal road project is causing justifiable worry to conscious citizens, while thousands of residents have no means to make themselves heard. Unlike the controversy surrounding the impractical definition of the Aravali hills, where the Supreme Court walked back its own order and stayed the recommendations of a Union Environment Ministry committee last year, Mumbai’s mangroves appear to be getting short shrift among policymakers and the courts. The unintelligent treatment of mangroves, which constitute a unique and important ecosystem responsible for various products from natural capital, is apparent because policymakers are assigning value only to produced capital such as roads, bridges, ports and machines. Former Supreme Court judge Abhay Oka and the water activist Rajendra Singh have rightly flagged this dissonance as alarming, and one that needs urgent correction. Mumbai can ill-afford climate insensitive urban policies. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) have forecast an increase in both the frequency and duration of storms along the city’s coast, and ingress into land from warming seas at the rate of 17 metres per decade. If a warming planet raises sea levels on the West Coast faster than the present rate of 3 cm per decade, things could get even worse. Severe storms and large volumes of water dumped on Mumbai would paralyse life, making the gains of the 26 km Versova-Bhayandar Development Plan road, proposed at a staggering cost, appear insignificant.

The Maharashtra government’s failure to independently assess the importance of mangroves to the State’s long-term environmental health, and its impact on the fortunes of fishing communities and flood mitigation through reduction in wave energy, is dismaying. While smooth traffic flow and economic prosperity are legitimate goals, these cannot be achieved through a zero sum model where the city risks losing out in the long term. The scientist Partha Dasgupta, who led the UK’s Review on the Economics of Biodiversity, pointed to the invisibility of nature, which hosts many provisioning goods, such as food, timber, medicines, dyes, fibres and freshwater. Because the benefits from many such natural goods cannot be restricted to some people - and canalised for profit - they are mostly unattractive to companies. More enlightened policymaking would readily appreciate the vital nature of these ecosystem services, and call a halt to destruction. Some states have launched policies to reverse the tide. Tamil Nadu’s mangrove restoration programme is a case in point. It claims to have planted 2,400 hectares of mangrove trees afresh and restored 1,200 hectares of degraded coasts in the past four years. Clearly, an altered design for the coastal road project in Mumbai that spares mangroves is in the city’s interest, and the administrators must work to come up with one without standing on prestige.