‘Poor, marginalised bear brunt of climate hazards’
New tool assesses climate hazard and vulnerability in Indian cities, highlighting impact on marginalized communities. Report emphasizes need for differential vulnerability analysis.
A new tool to assess climate hazard and vulnerability that takes into account the socioeconomic and political impact on people in Indian cities has found that it is the poor and marginalized that bear the brunt, according to a new report to be released on Monday.
“We have been trying to understand how to downscale vulnerability assessment to communities,” said Lubaina Rangwala, lead author of the report titled “Climate Resilient Cities: Assessing differential vulnerability to climate hazards in urban India”.
“For example, we know Mumbai faces coastal risk because of sea level rise, but many assessments assume the entire coast will be vulnerable,” Rangwala said. “However, the impact on the Koli community will be very different compared to big real estate on the coast.”
Landslide preparedness workshops were conducted in Mumbai after an assessment of landslide-prone locations and slum settlements in the city showed that over 70% of Mumbai’s landslide-prone areas fall within informal or slum settlements, the report said.
Existing vulnerability assessments largely focus on exposure to hazards, overlooking socioeconomic factors that primarily determine the vulnerability of people and communities, according to the report by World Resources Institute (WRI) India, a think tank.
“The Climate Hazard and Vulnerability Assessment (CHVA) developed by WRI India addresses this gap by building on the concept of differential vulnerability. This concept helps make clear that vulnerability to climate change varies significantly due to non-climatic factors,” the report said. “By focusing on both exposure to hazards and socioeconomic forms of vulnerability, the CHVA can help orient climate action toward the drivers of vulnerability in particular communities.”
South Asia is among the most vulnerable regions in the world to severe climate impacts due to extreme poverty and inequity, according to the 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s largest body of climate experts.
Climate change is already increasing vector-borne and water-borne diseases, undernutrition, mental disorders and allergic diseases in Asia by increasing hazards such as heatwaves, flooding and drought, air pollution, in combination with higher exposure and vulnerability, IPCC’s report titled “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” flagged.
In 2008, before UN climate negotiations, India began creating a National Action Plan on Climate Change. This process marked a notable shift at the national level, where addressing climate change more clearly became a part of the national agenda, the report said. To further it goals and assist in implementation, the central government in 2009 directed states to create action plans at the state levels as well.
This is where the new tool proves its usefulness. The CHVA comprises three parts: Hazard identification and assessment, exposure analysis and vulnerability assessment. The first provides information on the types and intensities of the hazards faced by a city, the second links those hazards with urban populations and critical urban infrastructure to assess the potential for compounding and cascading risks, and the third considers forms of socioeconomic vulnerability.
There are various measures by which socioeconomic factors can be assessed. For example, the report recommends a rapid social analysis by mapping primary, secondary and open-source government data and consulting with stakeholders. Mapping different socioeconomic, political, residential and locational or physical indicators of vulnerability at the ward or neighbourhood resolution using census data on essential services required at the household level would highlight the differential vulnerability of populations across the city, it said.
“In our work in Kochi, we found more than 55% of the city’s population cannot be reached by the fire and rescue services within the standard response time, indicating differential access to essential services in the city,” said Sudeshna Chatterjee, another author of the report. “Similarly, using the CHVA framework in the recently released Bengaluru Climate Action Plan showed that most heat and flood hot spots were concentrated in underserved peripheral areas within the expanded municipal boundary that had a higher concentration of urban poor and informal settlements.”
These assessments would ensure the inclusion of certain categories of underserved communities such as the poor, women, elderly, migrants, marginalised communities, religious minorities, informal workers and outdoor and informal sector workers and children, the report said.