How climate change impacts Indian cities

While Delhi is in the news for its soaring pollution levels, no big city in India is safe from the future impacts of climate change

- Bibek Bhattacharya

The National Capital Region (NCR) is beset by problems, with the unbearable amounts of atmospheric pollution being the most acute. But the crisis of livability that the city faces isn't just confined to this. There's the annual heatwaves, the severe monsoon flooding, the horribly polluted Yamuna, and a brewing groundwater crisis. Delhi isn't a pleasant place to live in—to put it mildly—for much of the year.

In some ways, however, Delhi is a microcosm of the threats facing India as a whole. As multiple studies have pointed out over the years, India faces multiple imminent threats due to the climate crisis. Heatwaves, supercharged storms, cloudbursts, drought, melting Himalayan glaciers, a falling water table, drying rivers, increasing aridity, sea level rise. There isn't a climate impact that India isn't already suffering from. And with every passing year, the magnitude of these impacts is only going to get more acute.

Climate change places additional pressures on cities, especially since India is one of the fastest urbanising countries in the world. According to the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report from a few years ago, the number of Indians living in cities is expected to grow to 871 million by 2050. In the next six years, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad are set to join Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru as cities with populations of over 10 million.

While this massive rise in urban migration raises the spectre of basic infrastructure-related problems, what may actually be of greater worry is heat stress. Cities typically are hotter because of the extensive heat island effect, and good urban planning—which can alleviate some of the problems—is sorely lacking in India.