India’s Cities at the Centre of the Climate Crisis

Currently, more than 56 percent of humanity lives in urban settlements. It will be impossible to mitigate the climate crisis without engaging with urban development processes. Current development models around the globe have a uniformity in generalizing a hypothesis on urbanization — that cities are the engines of growth.

With the advent of industrialization, large reserves of surplus labour migrated to the cities. The advanced world could sustain this as they had large colonies to support them. This also led to a trajectory of commodifying nature itself. Fossil fuels, the automobile, and the cement industry constituted important sectors of growth for mobility, housing, and transport.

The Wrong Path

Cities in the Global South, unfortunately, followed the same path of development. Most of the states in the Global South were decolonized in the last century, and in a pent-up demand for industrialization they relied heavily on the Global North for technology in order to provide for the basic needs of their people.

This continues into the present day: new towns and cities are built without even considering the impact that climate change could have on new infrastructure unless it is made climate resilient. The World Bank estimates that more than 850 billion US dollars are lost annually due to climate change-induced disasters.

At the 2023 UN climate conference, COP28, it was stated that the world was estimated to be 1.5 trillion dollars poorer than it would have been without climate change, referring to a report by the University of Delaware entitled Loss and Damage Today: How Climate Change Is Impacting Output and Capital. According to the report, “low and middle-income countries have experienced 2.1 trillion in produced capital losses due to climate change.”

Rapid urbanization can also cause congestion effects — for instance, by increasing exposure to natural hazards and putting pressure on public services and infrastructure. The effects are most visible in upper-middle-income countries, which have a higher proportion of settlements in the highest-hazard areas than any other group. Since 1985, such settlements have grown by 184 percent — nearly twice the rate of flood-safe settlements (96 percent). These expanding settlements in high-hazard areas lock in flood exposure, as well as future losses and the need for ever-mounting flood protection.

Workers Are Hit the Hardest

Another vulnerability in most of the Global South is that a large proportion of people are employed informally — in India, the figure is 92 percent. With the adverse impacts of climate change and dwindling social welfare structures, these workers are more vulnerable to climate-induced losses.

In India, they are exposed to the dangers of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, cyclones, floods, and air pollution. They are the first and the most exposed, and the least protected. The assault of climate change on their precarious lives and livelihoods is becoming catastrophic. According to World Bank estimates, nearly 75 percent of India’s workforce, or 380 million people, depend on heat-exposed labour. There are nearly 440 million people employed in India’s informal sector, according to the Economic Survey 2021–22.

One of the worst affected sectors is the brick kiln industry found on the peripheries of urban India. Brick manufacturing is a highly labour-intensive industry. Large numbers of workers are employed at each stage, including moulding bricks, transporting sun-dried and baked bricks to the kiln, adding fuel to the kiln, and removing bricks once they have cooled to transport them further. A 2019 study conducted on brick kilns in Chennai in 2013 and 2014 found that occupational heat exposure in the kilns during the summer months exceeded international limits for safe work.

India alone is likely to see around 45 million people being forced to migrate from their homes by 2050 due to climate disasters.

A recent study reported that between 2001–20, Indian workers lost 259 billion hours of labour annually due to the impact of humid heat. The International Labour Organization (ILO) projected that India would see a reduction of approximately 5.8 percent of its overall labour hours by 2030 for the above reasons. The work loss for workers due to floods, droughts, cyclones, landslides, etc., the loss of housing, and the displacement they suffer have not been adequately researched.

A recent ILO Report states that the fraction of global workers exposed to widespread climate-change-related hazards has increased in the last decade and stands at around 70.9 percent today. Workers are likely to be exposed to multiple dangers at once.

But climate change is not only affecting workers: Action Aid and Climate Action Network South Asia project that about 37.5 million people will be displaced by 2030 and an estimated 62.9 million by 2050, in five South Asian countries. India alone is likely to see around 45 million people being forced to migrate from their homes by 2050 due to climate disasters – three times more than the present figures.

The Way Cities Are Built

How does this connect to the question of cities? Let’s first focus on one issue: how cities are built in the world. The major sectors in cities contributing to greenhouse gas emissions are transport, household and industrial energy use, waste, and construction. If all these sectors are taken into consideration, we find a strong nexus of urban development and large transnational corporations which not only decide on how cities are developed but also what kind of technology is to be used.

Take, for example, the push for the construction of large flyovers and the widening of roads in cities instead of focusing on mass public transport. This induces people to buy more cars — and as they require more space, such spaces are then created.

Likewise, we see the usurping of urban commons for urban real estate development, thus increasing the carbon footprint. As Samuel Stein in The Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate Statepoints out, this is not because the planners are inherently corrupt. It is the socio-economic system that drives them to design cities according to the wishes of corporate capital, irrespective of whether these are carbon neutral or otherwise.

India’s Smart-City Mission

This was made starkly clear at the World Habitat III conference in Quito in October 2016, where the executive director, John Closs, kept on reminding the participants that, in terms of urban development, laissez-faire must be renounced to ensure that our cities become equitable and sustainable, both environmentally and socially. For that, we need to go back to the basics of planning, he stressed.

But so many years later, we know how cities are pushed towards project-oriented growth without having an iota of concern for planned development. The smart cities mission in the Indian context is a telling example. The government programme to redesign cities and city centres across the country started in 2015. But it had devastating results: Patna, the capital of Bihar, was completely flooded recently, while another city in the North, Srinagar, was also inundated — thanks to the smart city mission projects that dug up the city and broke the water channels that had existed for a long time.

Most of the cities chosen for the smart city programme were either state capitals or some of the colonial cities across the country. These colonial cities were built with an urban vision and layout to cater to imperial rule. However, the design continued to be based on high-quality engineering skills.

Marx concludes that it is not the restoration of nature, but restitution that is essential for a secure human–nature relationship.

Take Shimla, for example, another smart city, which was formerly the summer capital of British India. In Shimla there was a set procedure for constructing storm water drains: no concrete, embankments only, and no covering of the drains. However, under the smart city mission, this procedure was ignored (although this shift had begun somewhat earlier). Many of the city’s drains were covered, which led to them being encroached upon by construction, becoming blocked, and to further flooding in 2023.

Likewise, as a result of the general push to add flyovers and widen roads in smart cities, the water channels and drains laid out in colonial style, whether in Calcutta, Patna, or elsewhere, were encroached upon by construction. This caused water to spill out of the drains and caused flooding — not just once but almost incessantly.

Urban Inequality: A Systemic Problem

Urban inequality has further exacerbated the vulnerabilities of the large swathes of working people who bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change. Urban inequality is a systemic problem.

When Marx was writing Capital, not more than 5 percent of people worldwide lived in cities. However, the articulation of Capital emphasizes the capitalist nature of production in cities, leading to massive migration from the rural to the urban. In this process, Marx also points out that capital does not remain limited to the extraction of surplus value only in the production process. It also commodifies nature.

Thus, Marx concludes that it is not the restoration of nature, but restitution that is essential for a secure human–nature relationship, as Kohei Saito has recently shown. In the process, Marx develops an equation bringing together the intersections of inequality, nature, and the entire ecosystem: struggle against injustice = struggle for humanism = struggle for naturalism.

What Needs to Be Done?

Cities today are centres of human activity and need immediate attention in terms of climate change mitigation.

Urban planning processes must be inverted: enough of cities for capital. Cities should be planned with nature, and the basic process of planning should not be left to the consultants of technologically driven mega-firms. The process should involve people.

• Sustainable urban planning requires cities to embrace urban planning practices that consider the natural topography and hydrology of the region. This includes preserving natural water bodies and floodplains, and integrating green spaces that can absorb excess water. Flood-resilient infrastructure must be built that includes at least a very minimum engagement with the water-level contour maps. Improved drainage systems can help minimize and combat flooding in urban areas. Improved water management methods by enhancing waste collection and segregation must be practised.
• Early warning systems play an important role in minimizing the loss of human life. Timely alerts can help in responding swiftly and can save lives and assets. People with detailed knowledge of extreme kinds of vulnerabilities must be at the centre of preparing disaster mitigation and adaptation strategies.
• To minimize losses from urban flooding, a multi-faceted approach is required for effective mitigation. Climate-resilient strategies deeply rooted in a pro-people approach, and a strict ban on occupying water bodies, must be the priority to meet the challenges of urban flooding. Water bodies and lakes in the city precincts and around them should be kept safe and secure, and should not be opened up to real estate speculation and construction.
• Any planning should be based on the primary principle of the “climate risk-informed development process”. This should be done with a bottom-up approach.
• Major sectors of urban development that require urgent intervention are housing, mobility, and employment generation.

For cities in the Global South and India, there is an emphasis on urban governance as well. The empowerment of city government is essential here. Adaptation has to be key, as most cities are extremely vulnerable to climate-induced disasters.

The pent-up drive of cities to attract investment and handing cities over to large corporate consultancies has further widened the gap between the rich and the poor. In most countries, a huge faction of the urban population live in slums: in India it is 40 percent. Pollution is a major contributor in reducing life expectancy. In light of this, there has to be a radical shift in the processes governing cities: the issues such people face must be considered from the perspective of climate change, and we must ensure they can participate fairly in climate action plans, claiming loss and damage compensation, etc.

Cities as Climate Action Actors

One of the ways of achieving progress in this regard could be creating a climate atlas of these cities: mapping them and identifying the climate change hotspots. This requires a major support system from the existing financial architecture, including the outcome of the Conferences of Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

At the same time, cities can and need to support the UNFCCC process: cities find themselves excluded from the preparation of climate action plans, from the national climate plans to be submitted to the UN process, from the Nationally Determined Contributions, as well as from the National Adaptation Plans. There is hardly any representation of city leaders and the civil society groups in this process. There is virtually no debate over climate justice and loss and damage funds and the cities find themselves completely marginalized.

Reclaiming spaces at COPs and during the run-up to them in the respective countries should go in parallel. Cities need to reclaim their spaces in meeting climate action plans and should get a fair share in planning both mitigation and adaptive strategies.

It is estimated that in summer in Chennai, 50 percent of total energy consumption is for air conditioning.

This does not discount the fact that some cities like Chennai are spearheading their climate action plans and have decided to meet their zero-emission targets by 2050, even before the Indian national government’s stipulated 2070.

The city is in the process of preparing a Climate Action Plan, and its priorities include reducing the heat island effect. Chennai has just 12 percent green cover, whereas cities like Kolkata, Delhi, and Bangalore have more than 20 percent. The first task thus is to create these spaces through design. Designing streets with tree-lined and shaded walkways helps itinerant workers and others using such pedestrian paths.

A second task is recommending building designs with proper insulation and ventilation such that they consume less energy for cooling. It is estimated that in summer in Chennai, 50 percent of total energy consumption is for air conditioning. The Climate Action Plan gives tips on which AC units are best suited but also recommends that thermostat levels be kept at 25 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, the plan focuses sharply on public transport and on the reduction of private cars. It is estimated that this could reduce energy consumption by almost 40–50 percent.

The primary challenges of preparing such plans include ownership and ratification. Who owns these plans? If the city governments are part and parcel of such exercises, there is a greater probability that they will be implemented. If parastatals are running the show, then it becomes just another file in a folder!

Ratification and jurisdiction is another major challenge. The city is not fully controlled by the city government. The parastatals, most of them under the state and central governments, should be made part of such exercises. Otherwise the desired results will never be achieved.