Over the last century, India’s landscape has urbanized considerably: the urban population has grown 14 times since 1901, and by 2050 up to 54 percent of India’s population will be urban. Much of this urban growth is occurring in large villages or small to medium sized cities , resulting in vast ‘peri-urban’ landscapes.
While rapid urbanization is increasing the wealth and spending power of India’s urban population, urban development has also resulted in changes to land use that have challenged traditional industries; agriculture, fishing, and forestry, which are common in peri-urban regions, all face new obstacles. Additionally, climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events have posed further issues for both urbanizing communities and these climate-dependent industries. For example, climate change is resulting in an increasingly variable monsoon season, which makes agriculture on the outskirts of cities precarious. Climate change is also increasing sea level and temperature, harming fishing and putting people at risk.
Therefore, climate change action needs to move beyond mitigation and disaster response. Decision makers must plan for climate resilience in ways that protect these vulnerable industries and communities.
The Interconnected Challenges of Urbanization and Climate Change
Case Study – Arnala:-
Consider Arnala village, one of 995 villages in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and located along the north-western coast. Arnala has a predominantly agrarian and fishing economy and a population of 19,350 people. Villages like Arnala demand attention because due to increasing levels of climate uncertainty and regional pressure, the youth in the village are gradually moving away from the village’s traditional industries.
Coastal, agrarian economies in India are under pressure from both climate change and urbanization, making the future of these industries highly uncertain.
Rapid urbanization in the region and poor waste management systems have resulted in a spike in water pollution, straining the fishing industry. Indeed, urban expansion in coastal cities (or their peripheries) often results in the deterioration of mangroves, threatening fish species and driving profits down for fisheries. Further, due to an overall rise in sea-surface temperature, many native species have already migrated upwards from the southern coast, resulting in species variations along both the east and west coasts of India. These new species are often undesirable to local markets resulting in reduced sales for anglers.
Adding variability to this trend, unseasonal rainfall and flash storms, now common to the region, result in a sudden cooling of the sea’s surface. This impacts fish in two ways: (1) fish recede to the sea bed due to lower surface temperatures, or (2) produce fewer or no eggs as fish primarily lay eggs only when the sea is warmer. All of this makes communities in peri-urban areas, which are dependent on natural ecosystems for their livelihoods, particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Effective and strict climate policies as well as stringent urban development policies can help address the needs of these communities. However, peri-urban areas are often subject to multiple and overlapping institutional and governance jurisdictions, making regulation and enforcement difficult. Therefore, several questions arise, such as: how can urban infrastructure benefit peri-urban communities who are dependent on traditional industries? How can urban planning empower peri-urban communities to adapt to the pressures of urbanization and climate change while planning for a gradual shift in their economies?
Fishing, a primary source in income in many of India’s coastal villages, is being threatened by urbanization and the effects of increasing temperatures.
Potential Policies for Building Resilience in Peri-Urban India
Many villages and towns within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region fear that urbanization may negatively impact their livelihoods. This anxiety stems from the fact that a majority of villages that have been agglomerated into urban governing bodies are stripped off their autonomy, losing control of their rural economies. These conflicts, coupled with climate uncertainty, create a rather complex political landscape for urban planning at a regional scale. Consequently, a multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary planning approach should be adopted to adequately address the needs of these changing communities.
1. Management of Peri-urban Areas: This should include developing guidelines for the assimilation of villages into urban areas. These guidelines should ensure effective regulation to protect fragile ecosystems, and enforcement of building codes to control unplanned developments. State-level regulations should help manage environmental risks as a way of regulating and guiding urban regional planning.
2. Capacity Building: Planning departments often only represent the needs of urban communities since they assume all city residents live, or will live, in an urban environment. However, to effectively manage urbanization in peri-urban areas, it is important to build institutional and planning capacities within planning departments to represent and manage both urban and rural aspirations for development.
3. Knowledge Management: Spreading information about the effects of climate change at the local level and empowering communities to diversify their incomes during off-seasons will be critical for contending with the dual forces of urbanization and climate change.
4. Inclusionary Policies: Local governmental and planning agencies need to develop guidelines that ensure that urban resilience planning accounts for gender and age.
5. Finance Allocations: The state and local governments need to ensure adequate public financing for urban climate resilience planning at both levels.
Arnala reveals the clear impacts of urbanization and climate change on the industries and ecosystems in the peri-urban community, it also presents many opportunities to forge self-sufficient and low-carbon peri-urban futures.It is clear that the only way forward is to adopt a climate resilience approach to urban planning—including defining key urban development guidelines to plan for resilience on the outskirts of rapidly growing cities.
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- Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition, a collective of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway governments, came up with a $1 billion fund.
- LEAF is supported by transnational corporations (TNCs) like Unilever plc, Amazon.com, Inc, Nestle, Airbnb, Inc as well as Emergent, a US-based non-profit.
- The world lost more than 10 million hectares of primary tropical forest cover last year, an area roughly the size of Switzerland.
- Ending tropical and subtropical forest loss by 2030 is a crucial part of meeting global climate, biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Protecting tropical forests offers one of the biggest opportunities for climate action in the coming decade.
- Tropical forests are massive carbon sinks and by investing in their protection, public and private players are likely to stock up on their carbon credits.
- The LEAF coalition initiative is a step towards concretising the aims and objectives of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism.
- REDD+ was created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It monetised the value of carbon locked up in the tropical forests of most developing countries, thereby propelling these countries to help mitigate climate change.
- It is a unique initiative as it seeks to help developing countries in battling the double-edged sword of development versus ecological commitment.
- The initiative comes at a crucial time. The tropics have lost close to 12.2 million hectares (mha) of tree cover last year according to global estimates released by Global Forest Watch.
- Of this, a loss of 4.2 mha occurred within humid tropical primary forests alone. It should come as no surprise that most of these lost forests were located in the developing countries of Latin America, Africa and South Asia.
- Brazil has fared dismally on the parameter of ‘annual primary forest loss’ among all countries. It has lost 1.7 mha of primary forests that are rich storehouse of carbon. India’s estimated loss in 2020 stands at 20.8 kilo hectares.
- Between 2002-2020, Brazil’s total area of humid primary forest reduced by 7.7 per cent while India’s reduced by 3.4 per cent.
- Although the loss in India is not as drastic as in Brazil, its position is nevertheless precarious. For India, this loss is equivalent to 951 metric tonnes worth carbon dioxide emissions released in the atmosphere.
- It is important to draw comparisons between Brazil and India as both countries have adopted a rather lackadaisical attitude towards deforestation-induced climate change. The Brazilian government hardly did anything to control the massive fires that gutted the Amazon rainforest in 2019.
- It is mostly around May that forest fires peak in India. However, this year India, witnessed massive forest fires in early March in states like Odisha, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram among others.
- The European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service claimed that 0.2 metric tonnes of carbon was emitted in the Uttarakhand forest fires.
- Implementation of the LEAF Coalition plan will help pump in fresh rigour among developing countries like India, that are reluctant to recognise the contributions of their forest dwelling populations in mitigating climate change.
- With the deadline for proposal submission fast approaching, India needs to act swiftly on a revised strategy.
- Although India has pledged to carry out its REDD+ commitments, it is impossible to do so without seeking knowledge from its forest dwelling population.
Context:-
At the recently concluded Leaders’ Summit on Climate in April 2021, Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition, a collective of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway governments, came up with a $1 billion fund plan that shall be offered to countries committed to arrest the decline of their tropical forests by 2030.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]What is LEAF Coalition?
Why LEAF Coalition?
Brazil & India
According to the UN-REDD programme, after the energy sector, deforestation accounts for massive carbon emissions — close to 11 per cent — in the atmosphere. Rapid urbanisation and commercialisation of forest produce are the main causes behind rampant deforestation across tropical forests.
Tribes, Forests and Government
Disregarding climate change as a valid excuse for the fires, Indian government officials were quick to lay the blame for deforestation on activities of forest dwellers and even labelled them “mischievous elements” and “unwanted elements”.
Policy makers around the world have emphasised the role of indigenous tribes and local communities in checking deforestation. These communities depend on forests for their survival as well as livelihood. Hence, they understand the need to protect forests. However, by posing legitimate environmental concerns as obstacles to real development, governments of developing countries swiftly avoid protection of forests and rights of forest dwellers.
For instance, the Government of India has not been forthcoming in recognising the socio-economic, civil, political or even cultural rights of forest dwellers. According to data from the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs in December, 2020 over 55 per cent of this population has still not been granted either individual or community ownership of their lands.
To make matters worse, the government has undertaken systematic and sustained measures to render the landmark Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 ineffective in its implementation. The Act had sought to legitimise claims of forest dwellers on occupied forest land.
Various government decisions have seriously undermined the position of indigenous people within India. These include proposing amendments to the obsolete Indian Forest Act, 1927 that give forest officials the power to take away forest dwellers’ rights and to even use firearms with impunity.
There is also the Supreme Court’s order of February, 2019 directing state governments to evict illegal encroachers of forest land or millions of forest dwellers inhabiting forests since generations as a measure to conserve wildlife. Finally, there is the lack of data on novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) deaths among the forest dwelling population;
Tardy administration, insufficient supervision, apathetic attitude and a lack of political intent defeat the cause of forest dwelling populations in India, thereby directly affecting efforts at arresting deforestation.
Way Forward
Tuntiak Katan, a global indigenous leader from Ecuador and general coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, aptly indicated the next steps at the Climate Summit:
“The first step is recognition of land rights. The second step is the recognition of the contributions of local communities and indigenous communities, meaning the contributions of indigenous peoples.We also need recognition of traditional knowledge practices in order to fight climate change”
Perhaps India can begin by taking the first step.