Increasing Numbers Of Water Disasters
Chennai is becoming increasingly vulnerable to water-related disasters due to poor urban management, loss of water systems due to expansion and pollution, and increased climatic extremes. This has resulted in a large number of deaths as well as serious water quality, availability, and demand challenges.
Rising sea levels and increasing floods are a result of climate change in certain cities throughout the world, while drought and water shortages are a result of climate change in others.For Chennai's 11 million residents, it's both.
Chennai, India's 6th-largest city, gets 1,400mm (55 inches) of rainfall annually, which is more than twice as much as London and nearly four times as much as Los Angeles.Despite this, it made headlines in 2019 as one of the world's first major cities to run out of water.
Illustration depicting numerous calamities and the year they occurred.
Figure 9 •
Illustration depicting numerous calamities and the year they occurred.
The historic port in southern India has become a case study in what may go wrong whenever urbanisation, industrialisation, and harsh weather mix, and a growing city covers over its watershed to accommodate demand for new dwellings, factories, and offices.
While climate change and extreme weather have had a role, poor planning is the root cause of Chennai's water problems. As the city expanded, enormous swaths of the floodplain, as well as its lakes and ponds, vanished. According to Anna University academics, “the size of Chennai's aquatic bodies decreased from 12.6 square kilometres to roughly 3.2 square kilometres between 1893 and 2017”(Bremner, 2020). 46 | P a g e
