Building Climate Resilience

Building climate resilience collectively

#GS-03 Infrastructure, Climate Change

For Prelims

Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategy (LT-LCDS):

  • LT-LCDS is India’s long-term climate action plan unveiled at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCC (COP27), held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November.
  • It has multi-sectoral measures to reach a net-zero emissions status, climate-resilient urbanisation and forms a cornerstone of the Government of India’s strategy under the Paris Agreement.

For Mains

Need of Data and Urban Planning:

  • A data-driven approach is essential to facilitate implementation of the LT-LCDS and other missions, and enable their integration.
  • Adequate data would make it easier to demonstrate urban planning strategies aimed at climate resilience through specific actions and interventions.
  • It would also allow us to link them to various finance streams accessible to the urban local bodies, which is highly important.
  • Cities need to have effective and efficient planning instruments that can translate master plans into transformative investment
  • The Urban Sustainability Assessment Framework (USAF) is a major tool which help in this.
  • USAF is a decision support tool of UN-Habitat for municipal commissioners and urban practitioners.
  • It enables cities to capture inter-sectoral data regularly and does the corresponding analysis on urban metrices.
  • This in turn helps in monitoring the performance of a city in static and dynamic contexts.

The urban transport sector and GHG emissions:

  • The urban transport sector is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
  • We can see this in cities such as Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh) where they make up for 19% of the city’s GHG emissions.
  • Bhopal heavily favours non-motorised transport (NMT) with a 43% NMT modal share.
  • However, they provide access to public bike docking stops to only 24% of its population and only half of its streets have footpaths.
  • Hence, the city can immensely reduce its carbon footprint by designing ‘shared streets’ for personal vehicles, public transport, NMT and
  • They can also link these with future economic activity zones and underserved areas.
  • These streets can also be conduits for native plant species and improving groundwater recharge by integrating water-sensitive urban design features.
  • These measures have the potential of reducing Bhopal’s GHG emissions by up to 15 tCO2/annum per kilometre.

What needs to be done:

  • The suggested planning approach needs to have a comprehensive participation of all stakeholders in order to build climate resilience.
  • Active involvement from various tiers of government, nongovernmental, community-based organisations, and academic institutions is needed at each step.
  • The means from building a sustainability profile to arriving at very specific interventions, there needs to be a coordination between government and civil society.
  • Changes in the city performance indicators will help to communicate the impact of these interventions to the decision-makers and the community at large.
  • This evidence-based approach can make the cities sustainable, resilient and inclusive with no one and no place left behind.

Source “Building climate resilience collectively