[First published on the WRI India blog, October 05, 2015, and has been adapted from the blog title, “Beyond Mitigation: Planning for Resilience outside India’s Mega-Cities“]


Bringing in fresh fish catch to shore from a 4-cylinder boat coming in during the second half of the day; Photo credit: Lubaina Rangwala


While rapid urbanization is increasing the wealth and spending power of India’s urban population, urban development has also resulted in changes to land use that have challenged the traditional industries, such as agriculture, fishing, and forestry, common in peri-urban regions. Additionally, climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events have posed further issues for urbanizing communities and these climate-dependent industries. For instance, climate change is resulting in an increasingly variable monsoon season, which makes agriculture on the outskirts of cities precarious. Climate change is also causing the sea level and temperature to rise, negatively impacting fishing and putting people at risk.

Therefore, climate change action needs to move beyond mitigation and disaster response. Planning for climate resilience in ways that protect these vulnerable industries and communities is equally important.

The Interconnected Challenges of Urbanization and Climate Change

Consider Arnala village, one of 995 villages in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and located along the north-western coast. Arnala has a predominantly agrarian and fishing economy and a population of 19,350 people. Using Arnala as a case, WRI completed a research study to document and analyze the interconnected impacts of urbanization and climate change on the livelihoods of fishing and agriculture based communities in a peri-urban coastal condition. Here, due to increasing levels of climate uncertainty and development pressures in the region, the youth in the village are gradually moving away from the village’s traditional industries.

Coastal, agrarian economies in India are under pressure from both climate change and urbanization, making the future of these industries highly uncertain. Image Source: World Resources Institute


Rapid urbanization in the region and poor waste management systems have resulted in a spike in water pollution, straining the fishing industry. For example, urban expansion in coastal cities (or their peripheries) often results in the deterioration of mangroves, threatening fish species and resulting in a rapid reduction of fish catch. Further, due to an overall rise in sea-surface temperature, many native species have migrated upwards from the southern coast, resulting in species variations along both the east and west coasts of India. These new species are often undesirable to local markets resulting in reduced sales for fishermen.

Despite this trend, unseasonal rainfall and flash storms, now common to the region, result in a sudden cooling of the sea’s surface. This impacts fish in two ways, one fish either recede to the sea bed due to lower temperatures towards the surface, or produce much fewer or no eggs as fish primarily lay eggs only when the sea is warmer. All of this makes communities in peri-urban areas, which are dependent on natural ecosystems for their livelihoods, particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Effective and strict climate policies as well as stringent urban development policies can help address the needs of these communities. However, peri-urban areas are often subject to multiple and overlapping institutional and governance jurisdictions, making regulation and enforcement quite difficult. Several questions arise: how can urban infrastructure benefit peri-urban communities dependent on traditional industries? How can urban planning empower peri-urban communities to adapt to the pressures of urbanization and climate change while planning for a gradual shift in their economies?

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Sorting of fish on the beach front; Images show a clear reduction in fish sizes. Photo credit: Lubaina Rangwala

Potential Policies for Building Resilience in Peri-Urban India

Many villages and towns within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region fear that urbanization may negatively impact their livelihoods. This anxiety stems from the fact that a majority of villages that have been agglomerated into urban governing bodies are stripped off their autonomy, losing control of their rural economies. These conflicts, coupled with climate uncertainty, create a rather complex political landscape for urban planning at a regional scale. Hence, a multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary planning approach must be adopted to adequately address the needs of these changing communities.


  2. Capacity Building: Planning departments often only represent the needs of urban communities since they assume all city residents live, or will live, in an urban environment. However, to effectively manage urbanization in peri-urban areas it is important to build institutional and planning capacities within planning departments to represent and manage both urban and rural aspirations for development.
  3. Knowledge Management: Spreading information about the effects of climate change at the local level and empowering communities to diversify their livelihoods to include other incomes during off-seasons will be critical for contending with the dual forces of urbanization and climate change.
  5. Finance Allocations: The state and local governments need to ensure adequate public financing for urban climate resilience planning at the both levels.

While our study in Arnala reveals clear impacts of urbanization and climate change on the livelihoods and ecosystems in a peri-urban community, it also presents many opportunities to shape self-sufficient and low-carbon peri-urban futures. Based on our discussions with community members and various stakeholders and experts in the field, it is clear that the only way forward is to adopt a climate resilience approach to urban planning, including defining key urban development guidelines to plan for resilience on the edges of rapidly growing cities.


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