Stress On Cities Causing Natural Disasters, Depletion of Green Cover: Urban Planners
Urban planners and researchers have raised the pitch for an ecosystem restoration policy to compliment the Centre's ambitious Smart City Mission.
Several studies have shown that devastating floods, waterlogging, caving in of hillocks, depleting water-table and vanishing green cover have become common traits of cities that are facing the challenge of massive stress on urban ecology .
As the Centre prepares to select 100 urban centres for the Smart City Mission, experts and planners insist that the government must fund and support restoration of ecological systems whichhave undergone significant degradation because of rapid and haphazard urbanization.
The Union Cabinet has
cleared plans to spend nearly Rs 1 lakh crore in five years on two programmes the Smart City Mission and the urban development mission named after former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. “It is a fact that urban areas in India are in a bad shape and a lot of efforts are needed to take corrective measures. While planning urban renewal missions, we must definitely focus on ecology . Environment and development must go hand in hand,“ said union urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu while speaking to TOI recently .
Planners and experts, however, expect more concrete measures from the government with a clear policy on restoration of the ecosystem.
Ramalingam Ravi and Dharma Rajan Priyadarsanan, who work on landscape restoration policies, said that ecological restoration is rapidly diversifying to adapt and mitigate global environmental change. This has led to a growing awareness in few countries such as the USA, Canada, and the Scandinavian countries, etc and have brought attention to ecological restoration as a public policy.
Recognizing the diversity
of restoration goals, strategies and techniques, robust public policies are required for assuring their effectiveness in achieving the targets of the compensatory mitigative processes, they said. “We in India need to have a concrete policy and people should be a part of the policy and implementation,“ said Dharma Rajan Priyadarsanan.
“The Congress government had launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).There are lessons to be learnt from the mission which failed to achieve the targeted results.Local bodies developed infrastructure in a haphazard manner with the sole objective to get grants. No attention was paid to the city's ecology . Now, the present government should come out with specific guidelines so that physical development in urban areas is not done at the cost of destruction of urban ecology . It will be difficult to control the environ
ment degradation if cities continue to grow without showing any concern for the ecology ,“ said urban planner Ramchandra Gohad.
Maharashtra has the high
Maharashtra has the high
est number of people living in cities (5.08 crore) with an urban population of 45.23%. Urban population growth is accounted for 62.8% of total population growth in Maharashtra with Mumbai, Thane, Nagpur and Pune the most urbanized districts. The three districts especially their city areas --have witnessed massive environmental degradation.
In last 10 years, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has cut more than 17,000 trees and it plans to cut more, especially for road widening. At the same time, the PMC has ignored encroachments on hill tops and hill slopes and the areas earmarked as proposed Biodiversity Park (BDP) stands encroached with slums. In Mumbai, encroach
ments in Mithi river cause havoc during monsoon, but the municipal corporation has not been able to clear the way for river so far.
Delhi-based associate professor Shalini Saksena, in her research paper on sustainable urban ecology , says that climate change risks include changing local rainfall patterns that can lead to more frequent and higher level of floods from rivers, more intense flash flooding and sea level rise in coastal cities, causing increased flood damage.After the 2005 Mumbai floods, urban floods were recognized as a disaster for which separate guidelines have been laid out by the National Disaster Management Authority in India. While Mumbai faces the additional challenge of coping with coastal flooding, New Delhi face the threat of flash floods, river flooding and most importantly , urban flooding, which frequently occurs as a result of human activities, in
cluding rampant construction in floodplains and haphazard land reclamation.
On this backdrop an urban ecology restoration policy will help understand urban systems in the city and mitigate environmental degradation.The correlation between changing land-use patterns, pressure on infrastructure and its impact on availability of water, green spaces and the role in local climate change and weather patterns form the core of urban ecology , said urban planner Aneeta BenningerGokhale.
Those working in sustainable urbanization insist that people must understand how urban systems function and how and to what extent they impact and are affected by global or regional processes.Urban ecology investigates the interrelations between environmental compartments and human activities such as construction, production, housing, and transport. It also
hints at where and how the urban environment may be protected from further harm, and how environmental quality and physical human living conditions may be improved.
J Srinivasan, chairman of Divecha Centre for Climate Change, said that local development projects in cities will decide the future of environmental changes happening in that particular city . “Urbaniza tion is happening rapidly and local climate changes can be controlled only by planning at the local level. The development agenda followed in the last 100 years was wrong. Doing things in the short-term will prove suicidal,“ Srinivasan said, pointing at heat waves experienced in Bangalore city in the last few years.
As per the United Nations (UN) data, cities disproportionately contribute as much as 70% to the world's greenhouse gas emissions, although they occupy just 2% of the land area.