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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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.