Net Zero: Unleash The Genie In Climate Smart Cities Framework Of Urban Affairs Ministry

The effects of climate change are already visible now in the alarming increase in temperature, the change in rain spells, the greater occurrence of extreme events and the rise in sea level threatening coastal cities.

A recent report of the Centre for Climate Change Research, Pune revealed that the average temperature in India is projected to rise by 4.4°C by the end of the 21st century. 

Similarly, rainfall has been affected by higher and more frequent dry spells, which have increased by 27 per cent between 1981 and 2011 when compared to 1951-1980, as have intense wet spells during the summer monsoon. 

Extreme events such as heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfall, storms and flooding, are an ordinary affair now, resulting in deaths, community conflicts and damage to infrastructure.  

Cities are the most affected by climate change but they also end up contributing to it through agents like greenhouse gases (GHGs) while making room for growing urbanisation. They do this by allowing industrial units, houses, commercial, infrastructural, agricultural and livestock development activities.

GHGs also go up with the consumption of fuel, gas, and electricity for residential, commercial, transport, water and industrial needs as well as the management of municipal wastes of all kinds. 

India has committed to achieving Net Zero by 2070 by taking steps to achieve short-term and long-term targets under the Panchamrit action plan. By 2030, the plan is to get to 500GW of non-fossil fuel energy capacity, turning to renewable energy for half the energy needs, reducing CO2 emissions by 1 billion tons and reducing carbon intensity below 45 per cent. 

Aligned to the same goals, Union ministries and their associated PSUs have set measurable targets for consolidated efforts to reduce GHGs by adopting sustainable technologies. The interventions can be periodically reviewed and monitored against base years.

Indian businesses, which also have a stake in this with their Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) obligations, are also committed to taking progressive measurable interventions that can be monitored and evaluated.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) is implementing urban infrastructure schemes like Smart Cities, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, and AMRUT among others, to develop climate resilient low-carbon cities. This is part of the Centre’s commitment to achieve Net Zero, make Climate Smart Cities and achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

However, the robust institutional mechanisms to quantify the contribution of all these interventions for setting the base case and evolving citywide Climate Resilient Net Zero (CRNZ) strategy and plan for charting out focused interventions is not yet fully established.

Cities like Chennai and Mumbai have taken steps to develop Climate Action Plans covering both climate resilience and GHG aspects. But these are results of the dedicated focus of the state governments concerned and international initiatives like C40 cities. Nationwide, the system lacks an institutional mechanism to mainstream such aspects in the city planning and development process.

The Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework 3.0

The Development of the Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework 3.0 (CSCAF) under the C-Cube initiative of the National Institute of Urban Affairs is a novel step towards capturing the consolidated information on five themes.

It covers themes such as urban planning, green cover and bio-diversity; energy and green buildings; mobility & air quality; water management; and waste. 

The comprehensive framework can enable evolving citywide CRNZ strategy and plan by fixing targets and identifying interventions for the short, medium and long terms.

While at city level, this framework provides the opportunity to track the performance improvement in various themes over the years to achieve targets planned under CRNZ strategy; at State & National level, it allows the measuring of the contribution of cities in achieving SDGs and Net Zero targets; and also to evaluate the relative performance of the cities at state/national level. 

For the suggested framework’s robust implementation, however, the following challenges need to be addressed immediately. 

Data Capturing and Collation

Creating and capturing relevant and accurate physical, environmental and socio-economic data is the backbone for devising strategies to attain climate resilience and reduce vulnerabilities.

CSCAF has given tremendous focus on collating the relevant information to take a city-wide comprehensive view through 28 progressive indicators. Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) are given the primary responsibility of implementing the framework at city level.

For each theme and the associated indicators, the framework suggests the government departments and agencies responsible for undertaking the necessary steps.

However, for a majority of the themes and indicators, collating and capturing data in the required format to make a comprehensive assessment is both cumbersome and challenging. This is especially the case when data is disaggregated and lying in silos with different Central and state government agencies.

Furthermore, since urban functioning and governance is dynamic in nature, a periodic data-capturing mechanism needs to be established.

To overcome this impediment, the MoHUA strategy under the Smart City Mission should be vigorously activated and leveraged to the full potential to promote data capturing, sharing and exchange. 

Data Analytics 

The framework’s implementation would be dependent on the analysis of the captured data to come up with meaningful outputs for the parameters required against the indicators of specific themes. The analysis may be descriptive, diagnostic, predictive or prescriptive.

Based on the analysis, ULB functionaries would be able to take apt measures to improve the situation and make the city’s progress towards achieving SDGs (esp SDG 3, SDG 6, SDG 7, SDG 11 and SDG 13).

Since the data is with multiple agencies, the question arises of who would analyse the data: the data-owning agency or the data-capturing agency. If the data-owning agency’s main role is limited to the provision of data, then ULBs should have subject matter expertise and enough technical capabilities to analyse data and establish correlations for predictive modelling and analysis.

This is all the more important while working towards aspects of disaster resilience, city climate action plan, flood/water stagnation risk management, GHG inventorisation etc that requires capabilities to build spatial intelligence to establish linkages between climatic data and land-use patterns to extract meaningful outputs.

One way to tide over this issue is to form alliances with specialised agencies or appoint entities which could help ULBs to undertake these activities, establish systems/processes and handhold by building their capacities for the long run.

Strengthen And Institutionalise CRNZ Planning & Implementation 

Implementation of CSCAF requires focused effort. To undertake coordination and collaboration not only for data capturing purpose but also for facilitating analysis to derive the required output, dedicated teams with appropriate skill sets need to be deployed. 

Establishment of a CRNZ Planning & Implementation Cell (CRNZ-PIC) within ULBs could be the first step towards this direction. In the case of smart cities, the CRNZ-PIC role may be performed by respective Smart City SPVs.

Since CRNZ-PIC would require extensive financial resources to deploy specialised teams, develop capacities of ULB functionaries, create data and establish the digital soft and hard infrastructure needed to perform the analysis; special provisions need to be made by the Central and state governments to provide adequate financial support.

Once the performance of CRNZ-PIC reaches an appropriate level, business cases may be established to leverage the progress made in various themes to raise the financial resources from IFIs and commercial market for furthering urban climate resilience and SDG efforts through focused interventions. 

For example, GHG emissions reductions may be leveraged to raise resources through carbon credit mechanisms. In future, once a CRNZ-PIC reaches adequate maturity, through appropriate corporate structuring, it may get to access ESG-focused green investment funds by adopting SEBI-mandated disclosures.

(Saurabh Bhatia is a development planning professional at Ernst & Young, specialising in issues relating to urban development, housing and environment. Views expressed are personal)