When Sonelal Prasad, 28, left the house on the morning of June 16 for his work on a construction site in Mumbai – the financial capital of India – he did not know that he would dig his own grave. While working in the foundation pit of an upcoming height, one of the many in the city, an intense downpour triggered a collapse of the soil, buried it alive under the soil of rain.
The death of Prasad is the result of dangerous convergence while densely packaged concrete cities are developing and new fungi on wetlands, floodplaces and forests through India: climate change and random urban development.
While the construction worker succumbed, the impact of the first was felt through the city. Between May 25 and 27 of this year, the recorded precipitation of Mumbai was 67,600% above the average for this period of the year, breaking a centennial record of 1918. And although unprecedented, it was not abnormal. According to the latest report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), State of the Climate in Asia 2024, Asia warms almost twice as quickly as the world average through land and oceanic surfaces. WMO analysis revealed that the warming trend from 1991 to 2024 was almost double that of the period 1961-1990, in particular on earth compared to the oceans.
Meanwhile, as urbanization accelerates, cities are warmer than their surrounding rural areas. This phenomenon is known as the urban effect of the heat island, the magnitude of which worsens with climate change. In India, this heat of the intensifying city has the season of the monsoon, and its short -lasting, more extreme short -term rain storms. Add a boom to the new construction that barely takes this reality, and this can be a dangerous combination.
Indian cities warm up at almost double the rate of the rest of the country, according to a study published in Nature Journal in May 2024, with an average increase of 0.53 ° C per decade. From this, 0.2 ° C is directly attributed to urbanization – cities undergoing 37.73% more warming than neighboring rural regions. The impact can be fatal. In 2024, for example, heat waves in India resulted in more than 450 deaths.
“Warming in a city occurs both climate change and urbanization,” explains Vinoj Velu, Associate Professor of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, who co-written the recent study. The study analyzed 141 Indian cities using satellite data between 2003 and 2010. “By comparing the temperature change in cities with that of the surrounding rural areas, we could isolate the urbanization effect. Our results have confirmed that almost all cities are warming and, in many cases, warming due to urbanization is almost double that of rural areas. ”
Rapid urbanization
While the Indian population continues to grow, more people move in cities. In response, the country’s urban development – which often extends to random rather than following a clear plan – sees a rapid increase. According to a Primus Partners report, a management consulting company, urban areas should contribute 75% to the country’s GDP by 2036. The urban population should inflate to 600 million (40% of the population), against 31% in 2011. All of this has a climate cost.
Estimates suggest that urban areas around the world are responsible for 70% of global CO2 emissions, transport and buildings being among the largest contributors. Kamal Kumar Murari, president of the Center for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies at the Tata of Social Sciences Institute in Mumbai, explains that 40% of the Indian population living in urban areas, consumption will increase, leading to a higher carbon footprint among urbanites compared to rural residents.
“This higher consumption in cities … leads to greater demand for electricity, which in India is still widely satisfied by coal and gas, important sources of emissions,” explains Murari. “So, if cities have more people and higher energy needs, their contribution to emissions, and therefore climate change, is greater. If you reduce emissions in cities, you can resolve a large part of the global climate problem. ”
In 1991, India had only 18 cities with a population of one million or more inhabitants, depending on the census. This now increases regularly. In 2011, there were 52 cities. Another report from the State Bank of India last year predicted that it would probably be around 75 to 80 cities by the end of 2024. At the same time, the urban population increases at an annual rate of more than 2%. According to the World Review of Energy Energy Energy of the International Energy Agency (AIE), “CO2 emissions linked to India energy increased by 5.3% in 2024, the highest rate among major economies, driven by rapid economic growth, infrastructure development and energy demand.”
These factors have strengthened the number of heat islands across India. And according to experts, this then has an impact on the intensity of seasonal monsoons and their impacts on cities. “The extremes of urban heat due to more heating in cities and more intense precipitation which quickly transform into floods are two major challenges,” explains Subimal Ghosh, head of the interdisciplinary program in climate studies at the Bombay Indian Institute of Technology. “It is obvious that the spatial variability of extreme precipitation increases. This non-uniform is probably driven by urbanization and changes in land use and land coverage. ”
Vinoj agrees, adding that the effect of the heat island can even have an impact on the formation and precipitation of the clouds. “In many Indian cities like Mumbai, the winding side receives stronger precipitation because of the way buildings and topography affect the air flow.
Stronger policies are necessary
The expansion of cities has already exceeded the lasting limits. Most cities develop through horizontal development that ignores environmental vulnerabilities. Rapid construction, directed by business developers, compromised natural floodplaces and critical biodiversity areas.
Lara Jesani, lawyer and national secretary of the Popular Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a group of civil society, has been fighting for environmental issues for more than a decade in Mumbai. Jesani says that environmental policies have been eroded over the years to accelerate infrastructure and real estate development. “Thanks to the changes targeted in laws, construction is legally authorized in ecologically sensitive areas under the cover of public infrastructure or commemorative monuments [such as statues or government buildings]. These natural ecosystems play an essential role in the regulation of urban temperatures and the management of flood risks. But because many of these lands are deprived and lack protection under current environmental laws, they are sold to promoters. »»
Jesani believes that the fight against the impacts of climate change requires a structural overhaul of environmental governance and urban planning. This includes the application of significant environmental regulations, stopping unnecessary luxury development, prioritization of public transport on private infrastructure and the integration of community knowledge in conservation efforts.
At the national level, the country already takes measures to reduce its climate impact. It is expected that India’s current climatic policies should considerably limit carbon emissions by four billion metric tonnes between 2020 and 2030.
This will benefit cities directly. Having a clean energy supply, however, is only one piece of the solution. Better urban planning is essential, explains Murari. This means managing four key contributors to Urban Extreme Heat: construction, air conditioning, traffic and industry.
“In many cities, construction is so dense and congested that there is no room for ventilation,” he said. “Once the heat is trapped, it remains. Even the best planned cities like Singapore are now faced with the problem of urban revaluation, which shows how omnipresent this number is. The best type of urban development both from a development perspective and a climate point of view is an ultra-dispensing model.
Some cities now adopt thermal action plans, such as Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which created the foreground of this type in India in 2013 after a serious heat wave in 2010 led “1,344 excess deaths from the same month in the two surrounding years”, according to a 2014 study. Murari says that the Ahmedabad heat action plan has been adopted by at least 10 cities also published guidelines asking various administrative organizations to develop their own thermal action plans. ”
There has been a growing interest slowly for research, and action plans have been implemented in cities like Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Rajkot, Surat, Jhansi, Hazaribagh and Delhi, to fight against the risks combined with urban heat and aggravation of musos. This includes the stimulation of urban forests, parks, green spaces, catering and creating urban water bodies, sustainable urban drainage systems, rainwater harvesting, fresh roofs, well spaced buildings and air flow corridors help reduce the challenges of significant changes in precipitation or heat waves. Experts also suggest growing “trees and plant corridors” to help cool the cities. In addition to this, appropriate drainage systems are necessary in cities to prevent floods – the adequate lack of drainage played a major role in the damage caused during the recent Mumbai floods.
Vinoj says that because the cities of India are densely populated, even small local microclimatic changes can have serious consequences for human health and infrastructure. “Unfortunately, India lacked complete studies on the urban climate, but others are now underway, and we expect many new discoveries in the years to come,” he said. “It is also crucial to focus on the good planning of small cities, which are still increasing. Unlike major cities, which are difficult and costly to revise, small cities offer a sustainable development opportunity. ”
