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Drowning Cities - India's dry response
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- Indian cities drowning: As climate change worsens heavy downpours and water logging in ill-planned urban areas, India needs city-specific policy and scientific interventions such as early warning systems to reduce the losses and damages caused by urban floods. Urban flooding and waterlogging have become a regular phenomenon during monsoons across cities, globally. With extreme rainfall events in urban areas, surpassing each previous highest rainfall records, the future appears to be quite grim.
- Extreme events: With the onset of climate change, extreme rainfall events are expected to increase further in both intensity and frequency. The year 2019 witnessed a steep increase in the number of extreme rainfall events in the country, i.e., 74% more than 2018, as well as the highest recorded rainfall in the last 25 years. Such high-intensity rainfall, within shorter time spans, has the potential to significantly exacerbate the issue of urban flooding and waterlogging in urban areas if appropriate and timely measures are not undertaken.
- Floods at the front: Floods constitute almost 55% of all climate-related disasters in India, in the past two decades. Experts say that flooding has become an issue that requires urgent policy response from the perspective of both climate change and disaster management, as they play havoc with the urban settlements and aggravate the human and social crisis.
- Its roots lie not only in increasing climate variability, but also human and social mismanagement of urban infrastructure.
- Urban planning and regulation could not keep pace with the growth of cities in India, leading to inadequate drainage infrastructure, improper and unplanned disposal of solid wastes, the encroachment of existing wetlands, etc. that have contributed to the issue significantly.
- Human angle: Millions are affected across cities and hundreds lose their lives. Despite efforts, the problem persists with damages and losses increasing every year. Drowning and electrocution are threats to lives in waterlogged areas. Urban floods also cause the collapse of infrastructure in many places thereby contributing to the death toll. Most cities also have uncovered manholes and drains that are dangerous especially during periods of waterlogging. Last year the death toll in India due to urban floods varied region-wise, with major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gujarat recording at least two deaths or more.
- Indian case: Extreme rainfall events have shown an increasing trend from 1905 to 2005, with the rates increasing post-1950. Extreme rainfall events are defined by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) as those that record more than or equal to 244.5 mm rainfall in 24 hours. Extreme and high-intensity rainfall within shorter durations is replacing the earlier pattern of rainfall being spread over the months of the monsoon season. Many regions are witnessing delayed monsoons and deficit rainfall followed by incessant record-breaking rains, within shorter time spans. In 2019, Delhi witnessed the driest monsoon with the month of June recording only 11.6 mm rainfall, the second lowest in a decade. The same year Delhi witnessed incessant rainfall in December, which recorded the highest December rainfall in 50 years.
- With the advent of climate change such events will increase in both, frequency and intensity, leading to disasters across regions. This reiterates an urgent need for not just the management of such disasters but also the preparedness to handle them.
- Secondary not primary: Climate action in India is subordinate to developmental priorities and usually gains momentum post a climatic disaster. However, in order to ensure that developmental advances are retained and not lost to the ravages of disasters, disaster preparedness becomes a crucial factor. The advances in science and technology would be futile if mortality rates, losses and damages cannot be reduced.
- Wake up earlier: Early warning systems for disasters were developed in India as part of disaster preparedness in order to limit the losses and damages from disasters. While disaster management ensures post-disaster relief and rescue works, preparedness for disasters will help the concerned authorities anticipate the scale and intensity of the disaster in order to be better prepared to handle the same. Flood early warning systems, viz., CFLOWS (Chennai Flood Warning System) developed by the National Centre for Coastal Research of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, IFLOWS (Integrated Flood Warning System) and FFEWS (Flood Forecasting and Early Warning System) are being tested in the Indian cities of Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata resp.
- TERI: It has launched the Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) for Guwahati in collaboration with the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), a first of its kind in the North Eastern region, annually ravaged by floods. The model works on the weather forecast and rainfall prediction data of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and identifies the flood hotspots of the city. It also has an inbuilt system of alerting the concerned authorities when threshold limits of the hotspots are crossed.
- Preventing waterlogging in Indian cities: The flood early warning systems are enabled to capture the spatial distribution of rainfall in a city and are designed in a manner that can predict the intensity of flooding in specific localities. As such, the system holds huge potential to reduce loss of lives, damage to property and infrastructure and help in ensuring the general well-being of residents that are ravaged by flooding and waterlogging in urban areas especially during the monsoon months. As rainfall predictions of the IMD have also improved quite significantly over the years, with high degrees of accuracy, the flood early warning system at the city level can be a boon for citizens.
- Globally: The international climate discourse has also seen a shift in focus from national to sub-national actors to take climate action forward. Cities have become a major focus area for building resilience and reducing vulnerabilities to climate change impacts and disasters. With India’s urban areas expanding rapidly, this is an opportune time to address climate-related issues at the city level and devise strategies for improved adaptation and resilience.
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