Why Mumbai Should Mandate One Tree For Every New Apartment And Office Approved

Mumbai has always possessed an extraordinary ability to reinvent its skyline. Entire neighbourhoods have transformed within a decade. Old industrial belts have become financial districts. Ageing buildings have given way to soaring towers. Redevelopment has evolved from an urban necessity into an economic engine that now defines the city’s modern identity.

Yet, amid this relentless pursuit of vertical growth, Mumbai has steadily weakened the ecological foundations that once made the city more breathable, more shaded, and more climatically forgiving.

The city’s summers feel visibly harsher than they did even a decade ago. Roads radiate accumulated heat well into the night. Dense clusters of glass, steel, and concrete have altered how entire neighbourhoods absorb and retain temperature.

Mumbai’s residents respond in the familiar manner the city has conditioned them to. People grumble briefly inside offices, homes, taxis, housing societies, and overcrowded suburban trains. The frustration is real, but fleeting. The city’s deeply embedded culture of endurance quickly absorbs the discomfort. Most citizens privately acknowledge the deterioration while simultaneously convincing themselves that climate distress remains someone else’s responsibility to solve.

Mumbai today faces the combined burden of aggressive urbanisation and accelerating climate volatility. Studies on the city’s urban heat island effect have shown significant temperature variations between heavily concretised zones and vegetated areas. Researchers have repeatedly warned that Mumbai’s rapid built-up expansion, shrinking open spaces, and declining green cover are intensifying localised heat stress.

The city’s own Climate Action Plan recognises rising temperatures, extreme rainfall events, and environmental degradation as defining long-term threats to Mumbai’s future liveability. Between 1980 and 2018, Mumbai reportedly lost nearly 40 per cent of its green cover and over 80 per cent of its open land while witnessing dramatic growth in built-up construction.

Significantly, Mumbai has now initiated a fresh citywide tree census to scientifically evaluate whether the city’s green cover has improved over the past eight years. The previous census in 2018 recorded nearly 30 lakh trees within city limits, rising to over 33 lakh when Aarey was included.

Yet, despite these initiatives, Mumbai’s developmental imagination remains overwhelmingly centred around maximising floor space, accelerating approvals, and monetising land value. Environmental responsibility often survives merely as compliance architecture—sustainability reports, green certifications, decorative landscaping or symbolic plantation drives that rarely alter the lived ecological reality of the city.

The city should introduce a mandatory policy requiring one full-grown tree plantation obligation for every residential apartment unit and every office unit approved for construction.

The logic is straightforward. If a developer receives approval for 700 residential units, the city’s ecological system should gain 700 trees. If a commercial project creates 1,200 office units, 1,200 trees should be added to Mumbai’s urban green cover.

This principle would fundamentally alter how urban development participates in environmental responsibility. Mumbai must consciously avoid reducing this into another transferable compliance mechanism under the broader culture of TDR-style thinking. A builder should not be allowed to construct a dense high-rise project in central Mumbai while compensating environmentally through plantations in distant peripheral regions, such as Karjat, or beyond the metropolitan ecosystem.

Climate stress is hyperlocal. Heat accumulation is hyperlocal. Air circulation failures are hyperlocal. Human discomfort is hyperlocal. Neighbourhoods that absorb the burden of dense vertical construction must receive the direct environmental benefit of expanded green cover within their own urban geography.

Equally important is the quality of the plantation itself.

Mumbai has witnessed enough ceremonial tree drives where fragile saplings are showcased before cameras, only to perish quietly within months due to neglect, unsuitable species selection or absence of maintenance accountability. Such exercises create statistical satisfaction without ecological value.

The city instead requires scientifically planned urban afforestation, using native species suited to Mumbai’s coastal conditions, rainfall cycles, and long-term canopy potential.

Occupancy certificates for projects should be linked to verifiable geotagged proof of plantation and survival.

Mumbai approves thousands of residential and commercial units every year. Even conservative implementation of such a framework could result in lakhs of trees being added annually into the city’s ecosystem over the next decade. Increased canopy cover can reduce surface temperatures, improve pedestrian comfort, lower heat absorption across dense neighbourhoods, and gradually strengthen climatic resilience within urban zones.

The same philosophy should extend to public infrastructure projects as well. Metro corridors, road redevelopment works, government housing schemes, railway expansion projects, and civic construction programmes must all carry measurable urban greening obligations alongside physical development targets.

Mumbai today often behaves as though modernisation and ecological expansion are competing ambitions.

A city cannot endlessly scale through reflective glass, sealed concrete, and heat-trapping surfaces without eventually damaging the quality of life that sustains its own economy. Nor can environmental responsibility be endlessly outsourced through carbon credits, fashionable “green” certifications or decorative sustainability claims that do little to improve the lived daily experience of citizens.

A genuinely liveable city is one where roads remain walkable, temperatures are softened by natural canopy rather than amplified by trapped heat, and urban planning treats people as more than occupants inside real estate inventory. A city that traps heat eventually pays for it economically through rising electricity demand, worsening infrastructure stress, higher healthcare costs, and declining productivity.

Mumbai’s policymakers already understand the long-term dangers of flooding and rising sea levels linked to climate change. They must now recognise that a city cannot keep shrinking its open spaces, weakening its tree cover, and trapping more heat in the name of development while expecting citizens to continue living comfortably within it. Mumbai deserves environmental thinking embedded directly into the approval architecture itself because a city does not become modern by building taller skylines alone; it becomes modern when growth protects the basic conditions required for human life, health, and liveability.

Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai

Published on: Thursday, May 28, 2026, 10:02 PM IST