How to prevent disruptions by flood and extreme weather events
Current situation:
- Given the heavy and frequent rain during the monsoon season, urban flooding incidents have increased in frequency in India’s main cities in recent years.
Intense rainfall may be a result of global warming:
- The strength of climatic-impact drivers like too much or too little rain and heat, as well as the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, will increase as global warming advances and local warming in our cities rises well above the 2oC guardrail.
- As the IPCC and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) have demonstrated, it may grow exponentially much more quickly than our current management, planning, and infrastructure can support.
- It is necessary to plan for and cater for the significant future disruptions it would cause in urban India, including flooding, water shortages, and heatwaves.
Cities are at risk from natural disasters and the effects of climate change:
- In modern cities, climate risks and their repercussions, such as flooding, are highly noticeable. This is due to the fact that they concentrate a third of our people and two thirds of our economic output in regions that are getting denser with population and have subpar infrastructure for providing basic services like water, sanitization, drainage, and wastewater.
- Millions of people who are compelled to live in slums and informal settlements are made even more vulnerable as a result of irrational land use and planning regimes, which exacerbate these issues.
- Due to greater exposure and geographic sensitivity, cities in sensitive areas like rivers, hills, and the ocean are more vulnerable and experience severe consequences.
- Traditional compartmentalised solutions to the climate catastrophe are bound to failure because of these intricately intertwined variables. However, city and state leaders have successfully put into practise a number of realistic climate adaptation and flood response strategies from Surat to Indore to Gorakhpur and Kochi.
The management of cities must make an effort to lessen fatalities and material and financial losses:
Maintaining proper drainage (moon audit during the rainy season):
- The majority of metropolitan municipal governments undertake an audit before the monsoon season. The purpose of this is to guarantee that there exist storm water tanks, sewers, and lakes, that they function effectively, and that waste, silt, or encroachments do not obstruct them.
- It is a difficult task that necessitates year-long planning in addition to enough financial and human resources, which are rarely given priority.
- If done correctly, this can lessen the consequences of flooding and assist in recharging groundwater and surface storage during wet seasons.
- Integration of the drainage, water supply, and wastewater systems is the medium-term answer. It provides for the storage of considerable rainfall that may fall over a short period of time as well as the treatment and recycling of wastewater in order to guarantee clean water and sanitary conditions for the remainder of the year. Waterborne infections will decline, and services will be improved.
- Our drainage systems must be strong enough to manage the heavier rains that a warmer climate will bring.
- As a result, projects like AMRUT are needed to rebuild the fundamental infrastructure in big cities, but development is moving much more slowly than changes in rainfall patterns and the expansion of big cities.
Improving roads:
- Many of our roads have basically turned into stormwater drains as a result of the fast drainage system expansion in our metropolitan centres.
- The construction and upkeep of city highways must be improved to stop local floods.
- As has been seen in many cities, there is a need for efficient infrastructure planning and coordination by all relevant entities.
Planting greenery in urban places and utilising blue, green, and grey infrastructure:
- There is less room for water to percolate and flow as cities grow and transform into impenetrable concrete jungles.
- In order to prevent flooding, water shortages, and heat waves brought on by climate change, as well as to improve livability, urban forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes must be maintained.
- East Kolkata’s wetlands have been a trustworthy flood defence system for more than a century. They clean up a significant amount of the city’s waste, employ 15,000 people, and grow half of the fresh vegetables consumed there.
- For many Indian communities, realistic blue-green-grey infrastructure is the answer to climate adaptation.
Reducing the likelihood of flooding:
- India possesses the technological potential to map each of its cities and towns, fusing local topographic information with fine-grained satellite imagery to pinpoint areas susceptible to flooding.
- This will assist in addressing the vulnerability of the millions of people whose daily lives are disrupted by catastrophic occurrences and who live alongside riverbanks, in low-lying areas, and on unstable slopes.
- As a result, it improves greatly in terms of saving lives and rescuing people from danger, but it still has to do more to encourage genuine community-based resilience.
Enhancing early warning systems:
- India has done well to enhance its forecasting, early warning, and evacuation systems in many large cities after a series of deadly urban floods in places like Mumbai and Surat in the early 2000s.
- The majority of at-risk communities need to be included in this, and it’s crucial to strengthen essential services like water, power, and telecommunications so that they can withstand major disasters and recover quickly.
Conclusion:
- We must take action to protect our cities from the heat waves, droughts, and flooding that climate change will bring.
- Assuring that all metropolitan residents have access to fundamental environmental services including water, sanitation, drainage, and solid waste management is the most efficient approach to do this.
- Along with it, actions must be taken to reduce our vulnerability as a group, enhance public health, and redesign our cities so that they include more wetlands, parks, forests, and lakes that aren’t being devoured by illegitimate and frequently illegal changes in land use and poorly regulated real estate interests.
It’s past time to acknowledge that the planet is warming and that we must all make adaptations to climate change, regardless of our social status
