Climate-proofing cities: Will Mumbai pilot offer lessons?

Last month, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said that the coming year and a half is critical in the fight to limit the rise in global temperature to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C), and to avoid the worst of a climate chaos.

“It is climate crunch time,” he said, addressing the World Summit on Climate in Vienna.

It is widely recognised that addressing the climate crisis requires action at the local level —not only are cities the biggest sources of C02 emissions, but they also suffer the most from extreme weather events due to their high population density, income disparities, resource and infrastructure gaps, and civic mismanagement.

Indian cities are prime examples of this.

Although delayed, actions to minimise the impact of an expected climate upheaval have been initiated across our country. Facing bouts of deadly heat waves and urban floods triggered by unusually heavy rain, a number of cities are working to tailor their governance models to embrace climate resilience in day-to-day operations.

“We just had temperatures creep closer to the 50-degree mark in Delhi, so the window for action is closing rapidly. It is time for a paradigm shift in our governance frameworks, looking at climate as a part of our regular operations,” said Shruti Narayan, managing director (regions and mayoral engagement) at C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a global network of around 100 cities that has, among other initiatives, committed to formulating climate action plans aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement.

While five Indian cities are members of the C40 cohort, Mumbai is among a dozen cities selected worldwide as a “pilot” for climate budgeting. Mumbai was also the first Indian city to get a Paris Agreement-aligned climate action plan (CAP) in March 2022.

Released on June 5, the city’s climate budget report identified projects totalling 32% of the current ₹31,775 crore annual budget to achieve the CAP targets, and an additional 6.81% of projects worth ₹2,163.8 crore for integrating some of its components.

By implementing the climate budget—the first for an Indian city and the fourth globally after Oslo, London, and New York on the C40 cities network—Mumbai has embedded climate action in governance.

Last June, Chennai became the second C-40 city in India to launch a CAP aligned with the Paris Agreement. The city is revising its master plan for 2026-2046 to embed climate action in a legally binding framework. In addition, the Chennai City Climate Investment Opportunities Diagnostic has been developed to evaluate and secure financing for the implementation of CAP and is planning to undertake a climate budgeting exercise.

Bengaluru, another C40 city, adopted a climate action plan in November 2023. With World Resources Institute-India (WRI-India) as its knowledge partner, Bengaluru set up a climate cell in January. As mandated in the CAP, climate budgeting is next on the card.

Other cities are fast catching up. C40 is giving Delhi and Kolkata technical assistance for their CAPs. WRI-India is helping Nasik, Solapur, and Aurangabad with the same.

With technical support from ICELI-South Asia — a network of local governments — Ahmedabad released its Climate Resilient City Action Plan in July 2023, aligning it with India’s goal of bringing greenhouse emissions to net zero by 2070. Three months ago, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation formed a net zero and climate resilience cell to operationalise the plan.

This March, Nagpur, with support from ICELI and WRI, launched India’s first city-specific zero-carbon plan for building designs, materials used, and construction practices, with the target of achieving net zero emissions in the sector by 2050. Vadodara, Rajkot, Coimbatore, Thane, Siliguri, Udaipur, Trichy, and Tirunelveli, all with support from ICELI, have also adopted customised climate action plans.

“Using a robust, internationally accepted, Paris Climate Accord-compatible methodology, we have already built capacities of more than 40 cities to mainstream climate action in municipal budgets and leverage Central government missions such as the Smart Cities Mission, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (Amrut), and state finance commission grants. Alongside, we are tracking the budget allocation in eight cities over the last five years for climate action,” said Soumya Chaturvedula, deputy director at ICLEI-South Asia.

Experts sound caution

While optimism surrounds these initiatives, caution is warranted. Given Indian cities’ poor track record in implementing plans and policies due to institutional, political, and financial impediments, experts emphasise the need for a comprehensive overhaul.

“The climate impacts will be so severe that we need a holistic re-envision of what the Indian city looks like”, said Aditya Valiathan Pillai, a fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC), a research organisation based in New Delhi. He questioned whether Indian cities have the governance framework and financing structures yet to support climate action.

Institutional support

Operationalising a climate action plan requires an institutional mechanism. Lubaina Rangwala, associate director at WRI, said Mumbai took two years to establish these structures and capacities. Currently, WRI-India is conducting training in 43 towns in Maharashtra and supporting Mumbai with CAP.

Rangwala explained that the first step in Mumbai was restructuring the department of environment and climate change with statutory powers. Minesh Pimpale, deputy municipal commissioner of the department, said they focussed on hyper-local-level coordination so that there was no blame game and plans did not fall through the cracks. Each of the 25 administrative wards under the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has an engineer to coordinate with local departments.

Administratively and financially, Mumbai is best placed to launch these reforms since the BMC, India’s wealthiest municipality, controls most of the important departments. However, other cities do not have the same advantage.

The Bengaluru climate action Plan has 266 proposed actions across seven sectors. “The city corporation is in charge of greening, lake management, roads and storm-water channels, while water and wastewater are handled by another utility, and a separate entity has been created for solid waste management. Several departments run and plan for public transport and energy services. The climate budgeting exercise must take all these stakeholder partners on board,” said Shrimoyee Bhattacharya, programme head-urban development at WRI-India, who is based in Bengaluru.

Policies and institutions are also vulnerable to political whims. SFC’s Pillai emphasised that building institutions that last through political cycles is crucial. Also, the plan-to-action transition is one of the weakest links in policy implementation. Rangwala said government departments must learn to convert CAPs into well-defined actions with deliverables, timelines and budgets and think holistically.

While CAPs aim to mitigate, adapt to, and build resilience against climate risks, these projects are also about improving life in cities. A non-polluting and efficient public transport system, unclogged streets, fresh air, a greener cityscape, a reliable and equitable water supply, clean energy, and safe and comfortable housing are, in fact, the fundamentals of sustainable urban living.

“City governments must understand that climate is no longer a separate issue. They must manage the drains, stormwater networks, roads, and paved surfaces to prevent urban flooding. That’s a part of civic governance and climate action,” said Narayan.

Budgeting climate action

Local governments receive funds from the Centre, based on the finance commission’s recommendation and allocations made under the National Climate Action Plan. However, these funds are insufficient to address the required scale of investment. In such a situation, say experts, the most workable strategy is to align the city’s existing capital expenditures with climate goals.

Narayan said that it is important to understand that the climate budget is not a different layer like climate finance is. “Instead, it is looking at the municipal budgeting system through a climate lens where a city does not need an additional hundred million to spend. Even if it has one million, it needs to ensure that its climate targets are integrated with the municipal budget and actions are taken within the existing framework,” she explained.

Climate budgeting was first used by Oslo in 2017, when it integrated its GHG emission reduction targets with its annual municipal budget cycle. Almost 90% of the city’s emissions came from waste incinerators, heavy vehicles and construction machinery. But Oslo has since electrified its public buses, ferries, and trams, laid bicycle lanes, and aims to make all construction sites zero-emission by 2025. (WRI-Ross Center for Sustainable Cities)

However, it is not a prescriptive model, said Narayan. “The climate budget gives cities a methodology based on local governance and budget cycles. But it is not to say that the municipal government needs to do it all at once,” she said.

In Mumbai, 20 “climate-relevant” departments were asked to match this year’s budget items with the 24 action tracks mentioned in CAP. Based on their inputs, actions were categorised as direct and quantified, direct and not quantified, and enabling actions. Of the ₹10,224 crore climate budget, ₹9,707 crore was allocated to urban flood and water resource management — one of Mumbai’s five critical climate hazards identified in the CAP.

Future-proofing cities

In its budget report, BMC said it aims to refine the monitoring, evaluation, and reporting system to measure progress on emission reduction and resilience targets. The corporation is updating the GHG inventory, an indicative dashboard that gives cities emission contributions from each sector. This is then used to assign responsibilities, actions, and reduction targets accordingly.

Besides being an iterative process, climate budgeting needs to be calibrated to the actual climate vulnerabilities. “The actions taken today should stand against future climatic risks. Unfortunately, future proactive action is less politically salient than present-day action. Building a smog tower or a seawall will gain (immediate) political benefits, but will that seawall save a city during coastal floods in the future? That’s the political conundrum at the heart of climate adaptation,” Pillai said.