Warning bells have rung the loudest for governments and administrators of India’s cities in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the most authoritative and influential international body on climate change. Previous reports had flagged off critical issues on how climate change – realistically, climate crisis – would impact people and cities across India. The latest report parses a great deal more data from a granular level to emphasise earlier warnings and examines the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable people and places.
India’s large coastal cities rank in the top 20 that need urgent and comprehensive attention; Mumbai is placed second in the list of most vulnerable cities behind China’s Guangzhou. Kolkata, Chennai and others make it to the list in which 13 of the 20 cities are in Asia including India, China, Thailand and South Korea. The warning in this report for India’s cities, especially Mumbai, is not entirely new but underlines in bold red all that the previous IPCC reports had outlined as possible disastrous climate change impacts with robust data.
Whether chief ministers, municipal commissioners and mayors in these cities, especially in Mumbai, heed the bells this time or choose to ignore them will determine the trajectory that urban India takes on the climate crisis that’s already upon us. The low-key or lackadaisical responses from this group, reflected in large sections of the media, have not been enough to inspire confidence that they have taken the Sixth Assessment Report – also referred to as 6AR – with the degree of serious intent it calls for. This causes concern and trepidation, more than ever before. Wake up, please, all you men and women in charge of our cities.
Let’s get a technical aspect, which confuses many, out of the way. The 6AR is by far the most comprehensive review of the climate crisis and encompasses loads of peer-reviewed scientific data to back its findings. It deals specifically with climate change-induced damage, how bad it could get and what this means for people and natural ecosystems; it also delves into the options on our table to adapt to climate change. This is the second part; the first was released last year and focused on scientific aspects of climate change. The third and final part, expected in April, will examine emissions released into the atmosphere.
The IPCC reports should, ideally, spark off discussions and plans to address the various aspects of climate change they raise. These have to be necessarily helmed by the men and women who hold power in our cities, states and at the Centre. Instead, we have silent or cookie-cutter banal comments from almost everyone in power. Individual citizens and groups can do all they want but the most meaningful and far ranging action, on both mitigation and adaptation measures, must come from those in power.
In Mumbai, for example, state environment minister Aaditya Thackeray or municipal commissioner Iqbal Chahal have said little, so far at least, by way of response to the 6AR itself. This is of concern for at least two reasons — the city has the dubious distinction of being the world’s second most vulnerable city in the world, and the report makes a specific mention of Mumbai’s Coastal Road that both Thackeray and Chahal back to the hilt. They have studiously ignored all aspects of the Coastal Road except its value as physical infrastructure. Yet, the 6AR holds it up as a worldwide example of a “maladaptive project” that could have unintended consequences in the long term, damage inter-tidal ecosystems, and threaten fishing-based livelihoods. Sea walls, another favourite infrastructural measure, has come in for heavy criticism in the report.
The men declared their intention last year to formulate the Mumbai Climate Action Plan. It was a step in the right direction but we have heard little about the plan itself or its formulation since. What’s more worrying is the obvious paradox between their seeming sensitivity to climate change issues and their reluctance to factor in the possible damage or risks from their pet project – the Coastal Road – in the context of climate change impacts. Collaborators who work with them speak of their genuine interest and action-orientation on climate change issues, but this is at odds with their stand on the project and their unwillingness to even meet people affected by it. What will it take for Thackeray and Chahal to reexamine the road project that’s threatening the city’s future resilience to climate change?
Mumbai’s response to climate change impacts is still in its early phase, the report noted, which is a pity considering that the first warning is nearly a decade old. More importantly, the response has been more on the infrastructural level and focused on disaster management; less at the level of the city’s larger ecosystem level which falls for a comprehensive plan and at the institutional level which would ensure continuity in the adaptation-mitigation measures. This part causes trepidation. Even on the disaster aspect, there’s more attention to disaster management than to disaster preparedness though the latter is more important in the long run. And we are yet to hear meaningful announcements or conversations on climate technology, climate financing and more in the context of Mumbai.
The report has also highlighted the need for greater awareness in the public domain, or climate literacy, so that people are better informed. What would it take for Mumbai’s municipal corporation, indeed all corporations in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, to initiate sharp multi-lingual campaigns on conventional and social media on climate change? It’s something that can be easily done. What’s needed is not high-powered event-based streaming such as the one to announce the Mumbai Climate Action Plan but a series of continuous conversations and focused campaigns that reach the maximum number of people to arm them with macro information as well as the range of actions possible.
Anurgent flag that the 6AR raised, about time too, is the condition of the urban poor who will be most impacted by climate change events and may need to spend more of their meagre resources on simply securing their homes and health, even livelihoods. This is the elephant in the room and has not been addressed with the single-minded focus it deserved all along.
The scale of poverty in Mumbai is staggering if the right parameters are used to study it, one climate change event such as a freak super monsoon rain or storm or sea-level rise – all of which are more possible in the coming decades – can bankrupt poor families. What attention and place do they have in the city’s Climate Action Plan; what are the safety nets that the corporation and government can provide them at both the infrastructural and institutional levels, indeed how many lakhs or millions are we talking about?
Like Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata face challenges and threats that are similar but also unique to them. Ahmedabad is staring at more heatwaves and intense ones; a similar fate awaits other large land-locked cities. It’s time governments in cities and states stirred themselves into serious thought and action focused on building climate resilience with a clear articulation of long-term mitigation and short-term adaptation measures. Mumbai can show the way, if the men incharge are committed to addressing the issue.
(Smruti Koppikar is a senior journalist, urban chronicler and media educator. She writes on politics, cities, gender and development. She tweets @smrutibombay)
