Mumbai Climate Action Plan: From assessment to mitigation, here’s what the BMC strategy is all about

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has laid down a comprehensive strategy to mitigate the challenges of climate change in the western coastal state of Maharashtra. The Mumbai Climate Action Plan released on Sunday is a 30-year roadmap with short-term, long-term, and medium-term climate goals aimed at zero greenhouse gas or net-zero target for 2050.

The actions need to be taken at six strategic areas, urban greening, sustainable waste management, urban flooding, energy and resource management, sustainable mobility, and air quality, the Indian Express reported.

What is the Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP)?

BMC prepared the plan in collaboration with World Water Resources Institute and C40 cities network after assessing the greenhouse gas effect and natural green cover inventory of the Maharashtra capital. The first chapter is about the metro’s economic landscape, ecological, cultural system. In the second chapter, a baseline assessment is done about the climate change in the city, greenhouse gas inventory, air pollution.

The plan tries to find out future trajectories in business and /future emission of greenhouse gases and the scope of its limitation to come to net-zero by 2050.  It lists ongoing environmental initiatives by departments, their actions plans, and gaps in the effort. The final chapter of the Action Plan is about the roadmap to achieve the targets to reverse the effects of climate change.

Why does Mumbai need a climate action plan

As per the WRI India study on Mumbai’s vulnerability assessment, Mumbai faces two challenges, extreme rain events leading to frequent flooding and average temperature rise. Its vulnerability assessment suggests the city has experienced a warming trend.  In over 47 years with an increase of 0.25 degrees Celsius per decade for the city.

Over 40 percent of the population in Mumbai’s most populated East ward covering Govadi, Deonar is exposed to heat stress compared to only 0.9 percent f the residents of A ward.  Heat stress makes the body’s internal mechanism to control heat fails and increases heart rate in the process.

Strategies have been laid to fight these climate challenges with mitigation and adaptation steps.

Mumbai’s current greenhouse gas emission

Mumbai’s GHG emission in 2019 was 23.42 million tonnes of Co2. i.e 1.8 tonnes of Co2 per person. About 20 percent belonged to the transportation sector and 72 percent to the energy sector.  The waste sector contributed to the remaining 8 percent. Electricity consumption contributes significantly to total emissions (64.3%), due to the city’s predominantly coal-based grid.

How the action plan will be implemented.

Implementation of the plan depends completely on BMC. BMC will update greenhouse gas emission inventory, air pollution, climate change risks assessment and strengthen existing environment departments. BMC Climate Action Cell will share its assessment results with C40 and the City of Oslo for a year-long program to develop the Climate Budget.

Implementation of the pan will face challenges in sectors like energy, regional transport, there are limitations in the capacities of the corporation too in forest conservation and restoration. Addressing these issues sectoral and cross-departmental collaboration is also stressed in the report.