India’s climate conundrum: a tale of resilient cities

On 15th August 2021 – India’s Independence Day – Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi launched the country’s first ever National Infrastructure Masterplan. The plan was to bring together 16 ministries to better integrate and align government departments – helping the country work together, identify, and solve future infrastructure issues, before they became a problem. Once implemented, the plan could boost the economy, generate jobs, and expand the use of cleaner fuels to achieve the country's climate goals. 

Anil Kumar, Royal HaskoningDHV’s Managing Director of Water in India, felt privileged to be participating in the Gati Shakti event that was chaired by the Prime Minister. Royal HaskoningDHV was the only engineering consultancy to have been invited to the launch and with good reason – they were working to develop a brighter, better future for India. 

For Anil, he could see strong parallels between this push for greater integration and a project he and his team had begun carrying out a year ago. The seeds of that project were just beginning to flourish, potentially laying the groundwork for an integrated approach to climate resilience across the country. 

Anil says over video call: “With such a vast area and diverse geography, resilience planning can’t, and hasn’t, been implemented in a single, uniform, or nationwide approach. This is further complicated by the division of the country into 28 States and 8 Union Territories.”

It was clear that there was an urgent need for centralised planning and an integrated platform – especially for Mohammed who works tirelessly as a fisherman on the Indian coast. He lives and works with his family near one of Asia’s most beautiful beaches, perfect for those in search of peace and tranquillity. But in not so far away villages and towns, communities had been experiencing something far from peaceful – flooding. The thought keeps him up some nights, tossing and turning in his bed. His home, his livelihood, and his young family, depended on the coastline being safe, secure, and resilient.

Time to act 

As the Royal HaskoningDHV team looked over the Phase 2 project brief and proposal in Anil's office, they could see the previous first phase of the project had been a success. The objective at the time was to protect vulnerable coastal communities in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal from the increasingly frequent and ferocious cyclones. Thanks to the project, a provision of cyclone forecasting, and risk mitigation had been created, and multipurpose cyclone shelters were constructed. 

But now other damaging climate events were starting to appear in different regions along the coastline of India – showing the need for an expanded Phase 2. When the Royal HaskoningDHV team submitted their proposal, they were committed to going beyond the brief. In this proposal stage alone, the team spent time creating heat wave analysis, using remote sensing data, and taking into consideration other important components like future scenarios of climate change, population growth, and urban development. They showcased it all in a ‘vision city’ of what their modelling and analysis would look like in action.

“For this phase, the proposal was just the start.” Anil says: “The objective was slightly different than Phase 1 but fell perfectly in line with our deep domain knowledge and world-leading expertise. We had to provide guidance, principles, and a framework for decision-makers within each of the prioritised project cities so they could improve resilience and reduce the risk of climate-related disasters. Each area was subject to its own social, economic, and political challenges which made it difficult. Plus, no integrated study had ever been done in this way before – we were going in totally blind. In some areas, flooding was an issue, in others they were more concerned about drought, so we had to look at how we could mitigate every one of those issues.”

Anil explains: “Integrating stakeholders into the study was vital. So, we decided to hold workshops in each city, bringing together between 50 – 120 people each time including community representatives from each city, local officers, planning departments, urban development bodies, etc – it was a real challenge.

One of the biggest hurdles was the language barrier, as each state we were working with has a different language. We wanted to surpass expectations and worked hard to study local insight and adapt and deliver presentations, notices, and summaries in the local language – not easy but we managed it. 

Plus, we had to juggle with Covid-19. When each workshop has so many people involved, you can imagine the amount of work and organisation that was needed. Nevertheless, we were heading in the right direction and our work seemed to be paying off. Eventually, the team got a picture of what hazards each community faces and a sense of involvement in shaping India’s climate future.”