Creating Better Urban Ecosystems

The 21st century is often described as the era of the Anthropocene (Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced), as well as the era of global urbanisation: two visually powerful descriptors that describe an era of human impact on land and sustainability unlike anything the world has witnessed in past centuries. The footprint of cities is writ large on the surface of the earth, with more than half of the world’s population now living in urban centres: towns, cities and metropolitan agglomerations across the world. The rate of change from rural to urban land use has steeply accelerated over time. At the mid-point of the previous century, in 1950, less than 30% of the world’s population lived in cities: by 2050, global predictions indicate that as much as 70% of the global population will be located in cities.

India’s cities and urban areas, which now hold about one-third of the country’s population, are no exception to this trend. By 2050, Indian cities will accommodate over half of the country’s people. Because of the size of India, and its population, India’s urban transition will have major implications on the environment, energy use and climate change. In turn, the looming climate crisis will be a game changer for most Indian cities. Accelerated urbanisation has led to a large-scale reshaping of land surfaces, alterations in lifestyle and livelihoods, and increased teleconnections with distant locations. Over time, India has also witnessed a geographic shift in the location of urbanisation. The fastest growing cities of India include Surat, Agra, Tiruppur and Rajkot, many of which are in locations different from India’s largest cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.

Cities demand voluminous amounts of energy to support industry and manufacturing and for electrification, construction and cooking. Most Indian cities also consume large amounts of energy to ensure water supply. Bengaluru, for instance, brings water all the way from the Cauvery, across a distance of almost 100 kms, pumps it up to a height of close to 500 metres, and then sends it across the city through a network of pipes. The Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board spends a substantial fraction of its monthly revenue on electricity, giving us a glimpse of the massive amounts of energy this exercise requires. Yet even the water brought in at great expense from the Cauvery is insufficient to supply Bengaluru’s needs. Almost half of this water goes waste, victim to leaky pipes and unregistered usage. The need for additional water is met by private entrepreneurs who run borewells round the clock, using up more electricity. A similar story could be told for other cities.

Because of the size of India, its urban transition will have major implications on the environment, energy use and climate change

Cities guzzle cement like they guzzle water. Road expansion, the construction of new airports, high-rise apartments and swanky corporate campuses demand cement. Cement production requires energy. Most of the electricity that lights up homes, malls and offices, and powers our industries, comes from coal. Indian coal plants generate close to three-fourths of the country’s energy needs. Although the supply from ‘clean’ sources such as solar and wind energy is growing, renewable energy supply has been unable to keep pace with the accelerating demand for energy in India’s cities. Coal contributes as much as 40% to global greenhouse gas emissions, fuelling the out-of-control heating of the world’s atmosphere, placing the planet’s climate on a runaway trajectory towards extremes of temperature never before witnessed in human history. The petrol and diesel that powers the tens of millions of vehicles on the streets of Indian cities further fuels global warming. The greenhouse gases emitted by landfills and dumps, waste-to-energy plants, thermal power plants and the smoke from factory chimneys add up, increasing the scale of the problem.

Cities are major drivers of climate change. The relationship goes both ways – cities are also major locations of climate impact. Of the many parts of the world influenced by climate change – polar ice caps, coral reefs, mountain glaciers, vulnerable islands – cities are the most populous, therefore containing the maximum number of people at risk. Prominent in the list of cities affected by climate change are those on the coast, including the megacities of Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. Coastal cities are increasingly susceptible to flooding because of the increase in the sea level caused by the warming climate, triggered by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of ocean waters.

Previous estimates seemed to indicate that cities along India’s coast would experience flooding due to climate change, but only in some safely distant future. Estimates of flooding in 2100 were bandied about, worrying some prescient individuals, but leaving the bulk of coastal humanity largely unfazed. Late last year, though, new research found that the coastline (in India, and globally) was far lower than people had previously thought – earlier approaches had measured the height of sea-facing buildings, and mistakenly assumed that to be the height of the land surface. Because of this very basic mistake, scientists thought that coastal cities would be relatively safe from flooding for a few decades. These new estimates however suggest that Navi Mumbai and the financial heart of Mumbai could be under water as soon as 2040. The 2018 floods in Kerala displaced close to 1.5 million people – this number could be far more in a couple of decades, once flooding due to climate change hits harder and more frequently. As many as 36 million Indians living in cities could be impacted by coastal flooding by 2050 – a statistic that should make us all sit up and pay attention. Yet, Mumbai goes full steam ahead on plans to build its second airport on the Navi Mumbai wetland-mangrove forest complex, erasing a large and critical ecosystem that can buffer the city from floods, preferring to place its reliance on concrete coastal barriers.

It’s not just the coast that will be hit by floods and water shortages.Inland cities, such as Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, already located in drought-prone low rainfall regions, will experience increasingly erratic and unpredictable rainfall, with way too much rainfall packed into short intense storms (leading to flooding), and longer dry spells. Himalayan cities like Manali will face rising temperatures, affecting tourism, while cities like Leh have already begun to witness an impact on farming income, with climate change impacting crop yields.    

These risks spread to other cities. The rapid spread of Covid-19 in the wealthiest cities in India and internationally demonstrates that the very characteristics of global interconnectedness that fuelled economic growth in Milan, New York and Madrid made them most vulnerable to the disease. Cities are some of the most human dominated social-ecological systems on the planet. The rapid growth and emergence of new cities in India has, not surprisingly, created a variety of ecological and environmental challenges. Even distant rural landscapes are impacted by the demand of cities for people, energy, and materials, and the challenges of pollution and waste disposal.

Yet new cities can also constitute an opportunity for sustainability, if re-conceptualised and redesigned to maintain ecosystem integrity and health. Responding to these challenges will require our attention on how we can protect urban ecosystems, which are the best buffer we have to protect cities and people in cities from the worst effects of ecological and environmental degradation.

Planners and city residents often hold very different views on the value of urban ecosystems

Ecosystems play a vital role in ensuring the resilience and wellbeing of cities, cleaning up pollution and ameliorating microclimatic variation, providing areas for social congregation, leisure and play, and acting as local sources of food, water and energy. Yet ecological spaces in cities, including parks, lakes and riverbeds, wetlands, grasslands and urban forests, are the most threatened land cover categories in Indian cities, often being the first to be converted to concrete, built spaces.

How do we devise and implement appropriate policies for ecologically sustainable urban growth, which are widely acceptable and implemented? For this, we need to highlight the value (monetary and non-monetary) of maintaining ecosystem structure and function in cities. Only when we truly value the ecology of cities, will we be able to tip the balance and influence urban planners to value ‘green infrastructure’ or ecology over built infrastructure. While several European and North American cities have recently begun to develop green plans for cities, India has been slow to respond.

Planners and city residents often hold very different views on the value of urban ecosystems.  While urban planners and decision makers often tend to prioritise economic valuations, many urban residents value trees and lakes for shade, mental wellbeing, spiritual and sacred values and psychological stress relief; aspects that cannot be easily quantified in monetary terms. Nature has intrinsic sacred value in the eyes of many Indian residents. Traditional practices of nature worship co-exist with contemporary urban culture, with ficus trees considered sacred in various religions and water considered sacred in almost all religions. Even in slums, we find that an isolated peepal or banyan tree is often the spot for community gatherings and conversations; it is the tree providing shade and relief from stress.

Many people in low income neighbourhoods in cities grow and use herbal and medicinal plants in their home, or forage for wild greens and medicinal plants in abandoned plots, lakes and riverside areas and overgrown grass patches in parks, helping them improve their nutrition and increasing their resilience to minor ailments. Yet such uses of green spaces receive relatively little attention from planners, who have focused on gating and landscaping parks and preventing the poor from accessing them, banning grazing, fishing and harvesting of wild plants from most public spaces in cities. For example, gundathopes, or village forests in peri-urban Bengaluru, used by local residents to collect fruits, grazing material and fuelwood, have been converted into hundreds of public utilities such as bus stands, schools and health clinics.

The Yamuna riverbed only receives attention in times of drought, floods or when it is frothing in flood control in Delhi, but is ignored at all other times, despite its importance as a fertile agricultural location that supplies vegetables to large parts of the city

The Yamuna riverbed only receives attention in times of drought, floods or when it is frothing in flood control in Delhi, but is ignored at all other times, despite its importance as a fertile agricultural location that supplies vegetables to large parts of the city. Finally, spaces of nature such as public parks, lakes and gardens act as spaces for environmental placemaking, increasing social ties and fostering a sense of community, by providing locations for regular social congregation. Formerly degraded lakes in Bengaluru, after restoration, act as community nodes that have brought together groups of people who engage in diverse sustainability activities such as solid waste management and organic gardening. These provide opportunities to forge new urban commons and can offer a powerful way to integrate migrants from other regions, even those speaking different languages and coming from very different social contexts. Diverse groups can be integrated into communities of practice by forms of social-ecological activity as simple as shared gardening, building social-ecological learning and memory that is essential for resilience. Through acts such as these, urban commons can help significantly in making cities more welcoming and liveable for migrants who often arrive under conditions of great stress and insecurity.

In conclusion, in the era of the Anthropocene, cities have emerged as a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss and a trajectory towards an unsustainable future. Urban ecosystems can play a critical role in shaping liveable, sustainable cities. These ecosystems constitute one of the most endangered categories of space in cities across India. Yet they are especially critical for urban resilience, both at the level of the city, and of its people: especially the poorest and most disadvantaged. Urban ecosystems need to be protected, restored and recreated where possible to maximise urban resilience. This has proven especially challenging, due to the rapid increase in urban populations, the rise in urban land prices and the pressure for conversion of productive ecosystems to built land use categories.

The way forward is to develop and inculcate a widespread re-evaluation of the value we place on urban ecosystems, a value that includes monetary and non-monetary aspects and one that is shared across actors as diverse as private individuals and corporates, communities, environmental organisations and municipal authorities. Only then can we turn the large-scale urbanisation we are witnessing across India from a challenge into an opportunity.

All Photos: Harini Nagendra