Climate Change pose dangers to Mumbai

What is the issue?

• The journal Nature published a paper identifying the dangers climate change poses specifically to Mumbai and other coastal cities.
• The research indicates that anthropogenic climate change will inundate significant sections of Mumbai by 2050.

What does this paper reveal?

• Unless the city takes significant action in the next three decades, the sea will reclaim much of the landfill that the city has been built on.
• As per this study, Mumbai in 2050 will look a lot like Mumbai in 1700, unless the city makes serious efforts to adapt to climate change.
• Together with Guangzhou, Jakarta, Miami, and Manila, Mumbai now regularly appears on a list of cities endangered by climate change.
• As the cyclones battering coastlines near Mumbai and unseasonal, heavy rains indicate, climate change is not some event in the distant future.

What do recent studies reveal?

• Recent studies, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in Nature indicate that its effects are more intensive than earlier models predicted.
• There was a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate published by IPCC.
• It indicates that sea levels are significantly higher than were originally anticipated, and as such will have significant impacts on cities like Mumbai.
• As city residents are very aware every monsoon, much of Mumbai is tenuous land made dry, just a few metres above sea level.

What does the IPCC report recommend?

• The report warns the planners and administrators of Mumbai.
• It states that in the absence of adaptation, more intense, frequent and extreme sea level events with trends in coastal development will increase expected annual flood damages by 2-3 orders of magnitude by 2100.
• The report points out that well-designed coastal protection could
  1. Reduce expected damages
  2. Be cost efficient for urban and densely populated areas.
• There is an urgent need for adaptation and action in a vulnerable city like Mumbai.
• But, the city is ignoring climate adaptation programs and infrastructures in its development planning processes.

What is the problem with Mumbai’s ongoing project?

• Mumbai’s ongoing infrastructure project doesn’t address climate change, and this may significantly worsen climate risks that its residents face.
• This project makes the city vulnerable to flooding.
• The Coastal Road Detailed Project report and the Environmental Impact Assessment report significantly underestimate sea level rise.
• These reports were key consideration for designing the road infrastructure that is being built on reclaimed land.
• The project uses data from the period between 1878 and 1993, which indicates an average sea level rise of 1.27 mm/year.
• But the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled in India in just over a decade in line with global rates.
• The National Institute of Oceanography’s research has shown that sea level rise has increased to 3.2 mm/year in the period 1993-2012.
• The IPCC projects sea level rise to accelerate still further and faster in the coming years.

What is the concern?

• The infrastructure is being designed for the future (and not for the past).
• But still the planners don’t use current and future projections that will correctly estimate future climate risk in the design of urban infrastructure.
• We all can note flooding in Mumbai, elsewhere in Maharashtra, Kerala, and beyond.
• When important climate data are ignored in the design of new infrastructure projects, it is unclear who would be held responsible for the catastrophes that may unfold in Mumbai.
• Also, when climate infrastructure and adaptation plans are never implemented in the city, it is unclear who will be held responsible for urban catastrophes that might result.

Is there any infrastructure that could help?

• Mumbai is in the midst of a climate emergency which requires city administrators to rethink how Mumbai may be remade in and with rising waters.
• These unprecedented times demand new imaginaries, designs, plans, and infrastructures.
• But, experts say that sea walls, river embankments, and reclamation do not always prevent inundation from intensified rains and rising seas.
• They instead magnify the risks of inundation. Water seeks its own level.
• While a wall might prevent inundation in one part of the city, it would exacerbate inundation in other parts.
• Managed wetlands provide water with a place to go, but are difficult to create.

What could be done?

• Climate change is not just an environmental issue.
• It is a human issue and an urban issue that will dramatically affect every resident of Mumbai, particularly its urban poor.
• So there should be a change in the Mumbai’s priorities that are misplaced currently.
• It is currently spending a large part of the city’s ‘rainy day’ corpus to construct a coastal road that few will use.
• It would be wiser for the city to spend this money on mitigating the effects of actual rainier days, floods, and rising seas that already are a new normal in the city’s climate changed future.

Source: The Indian Express