aRTICLE | Mitigating Climate Change Woes
Alternatives for Secure Adaptation & Mitigation Strategies “Oh that house? It’s in the sea now- there!”, a story on the Pari website describes the engulfing of a house and many other houses in Uppada village, East Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. T Maramma’s joint family lived in that house until the early years of this century. The sea levels are rising, the impact of climate change is real!
Tikender Singh Panwar | Former Deputy Mayor, Shimla
ehold, it is not just the sea levels that threaten the thousands of kilometres of receding coastline in India and other continents; the mountains are also facing the same wrath of climate change; frequent flooding, receding of the snowline, increase in vector-borne diseases etc., have become a common phenomenon. The effort to keep atmospheric temperature not more than 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial levels is not heading very progressively. The largest contributor towards global warmingemission of carbon gases, and the global response for sustainable development is rather tardy.
IPCC VI, Working Group II report
The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was released on February 27, 2022. This is working group 2 (WG2) of the 6th Assessment Report(AR6). A large number of scientists across the world were engaged in writing this report. The report is voluminous; it runs into 3,676 pages. The report points out the
34 March 2022 | www.urbanupdate.in
interdependence of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societies. It also integrates knowledge across the natural, ecological, social and economic sciences, which is a departure from earlier IPCC assessments. This is good. The impacts and risks, and adaptation are seen in concurrence to nonclimatic global trends: biodiversity loss, overall unsustainable consumption of natural resources, land and ecosystem degradation, rapid urbanisation, human geographic shifts, social and economic inequalities and a pandemic. This is quite ambitious work done. Another critical observation is: “Current unsustainable development patterns are increasing exposure of ecosystems and people to climate hazards.” So, the development patterns are unsustainable and need a complete rethinking and reimagining to ensure a secure future linked to mitigation and adaptive strategies. Such a formulation has come for the first time. The WG2 lays immense emphasis on the cities. Why? The simple answer is that nearly 4.2 billion people, i.e., more people, now live in cities across the world. Cities are major contributors to climate change. According to UNHabitat, cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Globally urban populations have grown by more than 397 million people between 2015-20, more than 90 per cent of this growth occurring in Less Developed Regions. And the most rapid growth, according to the report, in urban vulnerability has been in unplanned and informal settlements and in small to medium urban centres in low-and middle-income nations where adaptive capacity is limited. Therefore, any paradigm shift in meeting the challenges of climate change must consider cities as the core areas. Not just that, only 25 megacities of the world produce 52 per cent of the carbon emissions, exhibited in a study of 169 cities. The most welcome formulations of the report are that it goes beyond the prism of technocentric solutions and speaks about systemic changes. The
