By 2050, 35 million Indians living in coastal areas could face the risk of annual flooding, the latest data on sea-level rise suggest. By the turn of the century, this number could go up to 51 million if global carbon emissions continue unabated. Source: Study (https://go.nature.com/2MZaKOW) on sea-level rise published in the journal Nature Communications on October 29, 2019.

Across India, an estimated 31 million people live in coastal areas at risk of annual flooding, a number that could go up to 35 million by mid-century and rise further to 51 million by the year 2100. These projections are based on extreme-case scenarios if global carbon emissions continue to rise unabated. At the moment, 250 million people around the globe live in areas at risk of annual coastal floods.

“This research means that the stakes are even higher than we thought,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, CEO and chief scientist at Climate Central, where the study was conducted.

Key findings

The study was led by scientists Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss of Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists, journalists and researchers working on climate breakdown. The study builds on the global elevation dataset by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), produced in the year 2000, and known to have some errors. Kulp and Strauss have used artificial intelligence to reduce those errors and come up with the latest estimates that show the global coastline is three times more exposed to extreme coastal water levels than previously thought.

Global sea levels have risen by 11-16 cm or half the height of a 500 ml coke bottle in the 20th century, compared to the pre-industrial era, generally taken to be the year 1850. Even if the world drastically cuts down its annual carbon emissions, sea levels would rise half a metre by 2050 or roughly the height of two 500 ml coke bottles stacked up. In the most extreme scenario the sea level would rise 2 m by the turn of the century, or equivalent to the height of nearly nine such bottles stacked on top of each other.

“The one silver lining of our analysis is while we do predict three times more coastal water levels as previously thought, what that also means is the benefits of sharply reducing carbon emissions are also three times more than previously thought,” said Kulp, who is the lead author of the study, speaking to IndiaSpend over Skype.

As many as 70% of those living in low-lying areas are in eight Asian countries: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan.

Most endangered

Rising global temperatures due to carbon emissions are leading the ice at the poles to melt, driving up global sea levels. China is currently the largest emitter of carbon followed by the US, the European Union and India, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2019. When looking at per capita emissions, Canada tops the list, followed by the US, Russia and Japan. India has one of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the world, and the latest science suggests the country is set to face a rise in flooding, erratic rainfall and storms as the planet heats at a record pace.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Gueterres has asked for a 45% cut in global carbon emissions by 2030. The remaining emissions must be soaked up by “carbon sinks” such as forests, oceans and soil, and reduced to what is called “net-zero” by 2050 to contain global temperature rise to 1.5 deg C.

Many of the island nations most affected by sea level rise have contributed negligible amounts to global carbon emissions and are already on their way to becoming carbon neutral. But large amounts of carbon already released into the atmosphere means, “even if we went carbon neutral today there will still be substantial dangers to coastal populations”, said Kulp.

Fight For Survival: Mumbai, Surat, Kolkata & Chennai

Projections based on latest data show large parts of coastal cities including Mumbai and the coastal areas of Odisha and the north-east will be inundated by mid-century.
Source: Coastal Risk Screening Tool by Climate Central

The global temperature rise has set in motion melting that will continue for some time even if the carbon emissions were drastically reduced today. When an ice cube is put on a table it does not melt immediately, it takes some time. Scientists say something similar is happening to the glaciers in the Arctic and the Antarctic region. “Unfortunately, the glaciers and the ice sheets of the world, they haven’t caught up with the warming that we have already caused,” said Strauss, co-author of the study.

“The amount of emissions we make does not make a lot of difference (to sea level rise) between now and mid-century, but it makes a much greater difference at the end of the century and even beyond that,” said Strauss. By continuing to pollute we increase the chance of the worst-case scenario, he said.

The study did not take into account flooding due to erratic monsoons in India but scientists said that it could push up the numbers of those likely to be affected by flooding.

Climate refugees

India has a 7,500-km coastline and the second largest coastal population at risk due to sea level rise after China’s current 81 million. “The impact of the warming oceans will increase climatic events such as cyclones,” said Anjal Prakash, associate professor, Regional Water Studies, TERI School of Advanced Studies. “These events are predicted to be on the rise and will be more severe in future decades.” Prakash, who was the coordinating lead author of a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, the UN body to assess the science on climate change), added that “shifting rainfall patterns of Indian monsoon will also have a bearing for people living in coastal areas”.

Together, these factors are likely to push up migration.

As salt water from the seas enters inland, it renders fields unfit for cultivation, as IndiaSpend reported from Odisha and West Bengal on the rise in undocumented internal migration in the country. With large parts of Bangladesh set to become more saline or be inundated, international migration is also set to rise, evidence suggests.

But across the world, many are choosing to stay back, and governments are directing resources to building coastal walls to allow communities to remain where they are even as sea levels rise.

Mitigation, adaptation

Globally, around 110 million people are already living in areas below high-tide levels; in India this number stands at 17 million. “That would suggest that there are sea walls in various places that would allow habitation of certain neighbourhoods that would otherwise be below the high tide line,” said Strauss from Climate Central. “But what happens in neighbourhoods when it rains is that the water has a hard time getting out.”
The number of people already living in areas below high-tide line suggests that it is possible to defend a very large number of people but it would get increasingly expensive to do so, said scientists.

“One of the key considerations in mitigation strategies and how aggressively to mitigate is how much risk are you willing to tolerate of this really drastic scenario of rapid sea level rise,” said Strauss.

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Migrants often provide essential services in cities, working as drivers, gardeners, and domestic help, boosting cities’ economies. Yet, of a migrant population of 62.6 million in Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Delhi in 2011, 33.4 million went to the urban fringes, found the analysis by India Migration Now, a Mumbai-based nonprofit.

These urban fringes have limited civic infrastructure and municipal facilities, prevent migrants from accessing all the opportunities of the main city, and make them susceptible to poor health and living conditions.

Internal migration, both within a state and across states in India, improves households’ socioeconomic status, and benefits both the region that people migrate to and where they migrate from, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2019. Remittances can help reduce poverty in the migrants’ places of origin.

Migration of socio-economically backward people to cities is one of the best ways of promoting inclusive development by providing infrastructure in city centres at lower costs, generating employment, and facilitating the movement of the population from remote and inaccessible areas.

Yet, interstate migration in India is less than in other countries at a similar stage of economic development, studies show. A 2016 World Bank study attributed this partly to the migrant-unfriendly policies in many parts of the country, which also force migrants to the outskirts of cities.

Urban agglomerations

Urban agglomerations such as Mumbai and Delhi include a continuous urban spread of a town and its adjoining outgrowths–such as Central Railway Colony in Mumbai–or, two or more physically contiguous towns–such as Noida in the case of Delhi–according to the Census.

India’s urban agglomerations often spread over several districts, have a population above 7 million, cover various municipal corporations, and have an urban core and an urban periphery (peri-urban area).

The India Migration Now analysis categorised areas as urban and peri-urban based on distance to the urban core, population, presence of a municipal corporation, the proportion of workers engaged in non-agricultural activities and the nature of urbanisation of the area, based on the 2011 census.

For example, in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area, the districts of Kolkata and Howrah were categorised as urban cores as they have municipal corporations, high percentages of built-up area and low rural populations. The districts of North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Nadia, and Hugli, with low percentages of built-up area, high rural population and no municipal corporation, were categorised as peri-urban.

Saturated cities

In 2001 and 2011, the proportion of migrants who settled in the urban periphery versus those who settled in the urban core was greater for the urban agglomerations of Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

In only two urban agglomerations, Delhi (12.5 million in the city, 1.3 million peri-urban) and Bengaluru (5.1 million in the city and 859,030 in the outskirts), did more migrants settle in the urban core, rather than the peri-urban.

The Bengaluru urban agglomeration is a relatively nascent phenomenon, and has only recently spilled beyond Bengaluru Urban into the Bengaluru Rural and Ramanagara districts. This could explain why the city is yet to reach its saturation point in terms of attracting migrants.

The National Capital Region (NCR) includes the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi as well as 23 other towns in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan, as per the NCR Planning Board. In this analysis, the Delhi urban agglomeration includes only the NCT of Delhi and its immediately bordering districts. Movement from NCT of Delhi itself to various urban hubs (Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budhh Nagar) of NCR accounts for 6.3% (783,474) of the migration into the urban parts of NCR.

Migration to Mumbai’s core stayed mostly constant between 2001 and 2011 (going from 5.2 million to 5.5 million), but migration to its peri-urban areas increased from 5.6 million in 2001 to 8.9 million in 2011. For no other urban agglomeration did migration to the core city increase so little over the decade.

Mumbai’s massive growth and urbanisation has been driven by migration since the 1800s, according to the 2009 Mumbai Human Development Report by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. In recent years, however, the landmass-to-population ratio has been inching towards tipping point in the main city, leading to growing slums and overcrowding, the report said.

Source: India Migration Now

This dashboard by India Migration Now shows migration into the urban and peri-urban areas of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru in 2001 and 2011.

Discrimination against migrants

One of the reasons driving more and more migrants (and some locals) to the peri-urban areas is the cost of living in the urban core, especially of housing, according to a 2019 paper by the Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based public policy think-tank.

In addition to the high cost of living, government schemes for temporary and permanent housing exclude interstate migrants, according to the Interstate Migrant Policy Index 2019 (IMPEX 2019) by India Migration Now, which analyses state-level policies for the integration of out-of-state migrants.

Migrants often stay in slums and temporary habitations, and forced evictions without rehabilitation, compensation or notice push them to the fringes.

For instance, a tussle over prime city property and the perception that the urban poor are illegal and encroach upon land prompted state response in the form of large-scale “city beautification” drives and slum rehabilitation projects, according to this 2018 report by the Human Rights Law Network, a Delhi-based legal aid organisation. Evictions took place in major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Caste- and religion-based residential segregation, often connected to migratory status, also forces migrants to move to the peri-urban areas where the price of exclusion is at least lower, found a study published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2012, and a 2018 working paper by the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru.

Migration trends among Muslims and Hindu Dalit (historically disadvantaged communities believed to be ‘lower’ castes) communities reveals diminishing access to urban space, because of several factors such as discrimination by housing societies, according to a 2019 analysis published in the journal Area Development and Policy.

Governments of several large states have had anti-migrant policies, through domicile reservation in employment, education and service delivery. For instance, the Andhra Pradesh (AP) government passed the AP Employment of Local Candidates in Industries/Factories Bill in July 2019 reserving 75% of private industrial jobs for locals.

In Maharashtra, where 80% of non-supervisory jobs and 50% of supervisory ones are reserved for state residents since 2008, the governing Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena alliance announced the possibility of a law monitoring better implementation of the quotas and extension of the law to contract-based jobs, according to this report in The Times of India published in August 2019.

The Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi wrote in its manifesto for the 2019 elections that it would reserve 85% of jobs for locals. The Karnataka government said it would implement 100% domicile reservation in private companies, according to a report in The Times of India in February 2019. All these states are home to many migrants who live and work in the periphery of their urban agglomerations.

Unequal access to health, sanitation 

Migrants have inadequate access to health facilities with regard to state-level health schemes, and central government health programmes implemented by state governments–which do not account for incoming migrants–found the 2019 IMPEX analysis.

Internal female migrants in Mumbai made lesser use of health facilities for childbirth, with less than a third receiving antenatal care, according to a 2016 study.

Migrant families are also the most vulnerable and nutritionally insecure because of lack of subsidised food, and children are the worst affected due to the unavailability of the government’s Integrated Child Development Services available to them, found a 2019 study of migrants at a construction site in Ahmedabad.

Access to infrastructural services–water supply, waste management, sanitation and transport facilities–reduces as one moves away from the urban core, according to a 2013 report by the World Bank. Those living in the peripheries bear the ecological, psychological and economic fallout of this lack of infrastructure.

For example, in Bengaluru, access to network services such as piped water is concentrated in the core with access levels rapidly dropping off toward the periphery, the report said.

“In Hyderabad, despite peri-urban areas being richer in water resources, the residents of these areas lose out to a wealthier urban core population with higher purchasing power when it comes to water access,” according to a research study by the South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies, a policy research institute based in Hyderabad.

Similar issues exist in the peri-urban areas of Chennai, particularly with regard to solid waste management, groundwater depletion and salinity, according to a 2014 study conducted by the United States East-West Centre, a non-profit based in Hawaii, USA.

Policing and traffic administration is also poor in peri-urban areas, according to a 2019 report by the Observer Research Foundation.

Neglected peri-urban areas

In peri-urban areas, which are largely neglected by both the urban and rural administrations, there is often confusion about who is responsible for public services: the panchayat or the municipal government, found a 2015 paper published in the International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology.

Master plans for Indian cities often legitimise the peripheries, but leave them unregulated, according to a 2018 working paper by Mrinalini Goswami of the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bengaluru. One of the reasons for this is the lack of congruence between urban planning and the realities of local governance.

For example, under the 1985 Model Regional and Town Planning and Development Law, the elected officials of the Metropolitan Planning Committees (MPC) should draw up regional development plans for urban areas. The 74th Amendment to the Constitution mandates that at least two-thirds of the MPC should be elected or should have elected members of the municipalities and panchayats in the area.

Yet, the unelected bureaucracy of the Bengaluru Development Authority continues to be in charge of drawing up the master plans. As a result, planning remains static and top-down, without public participation, and unable to adequately account for the dynamic way in which the peripheries of cities, and the needs of people, change. Inadequate coordination between different government bodies also impacts the delivery of services to citizens, according to a 2013 World Bank study.

Social discrimination

Often, peri-urban areas have heightened caste or religious discrimination, even as the urban core becomes more diverse.

For instance, Raigarh district, in Mumbai’s periphery, has been the site of caste-based conflict and discrimination, according to an India Today report, published in April 2019.

Similarly, in Thane district, also a part of peri-urban Mumbai, caste outweighs all other parameters for political parties when choosing candidates, according to a Times of India report published in April 2019.

Interstate migration increasing slower than it should

Between 1991 and 2011, more Indians migrated than in the decade before, data show. In 2011, 453.6 million migrated, almost 1.4 times of the 314.5 million who migrated in 2001.

Still, interstate migration in India grew slower in the past two decades, increasing 32% from 41 million in 2001 to 54 million in 2011. In comparison, it increased by 55% between 1991 and 2001, data show.

The choice of the city people move to depends on factors such as proximity to their hometown, perceived availability and accessibility of work. For example, Gulbarga, in Karnataka, is close to Maharashtra and Telangana and sends migrants to Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
Historical migration trends, migrant networks and city infrastructure also impact the destination cities of migrants.

Many from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh migrate to Delhi, those from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to Mumbai, and those from Rajasthan to Chennai and Kolkata, Census 2011 data show.

Need for new government policies

With migrant-unfriendly policies, it has become increasingly difficult for the poor to shift to urban centres in pursuit of survival. Only long-term inclusive policy-making which addresses the multiple exclusions faced by migrants in cities and peri-urban areas can help India capitalise on the opportunities of migration.

Provision of rental housing services, improvement of the service delivery system both in the urban and peri-urban areas, and better coordination between urban governance bodies could help urban agglomerations grow faster economically and provide more support to the migrant population.

(Mitra, Damle and Varshney are researchers at Mumbai-based nonprofit India Migration Now.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Shutterstock.

Empirical investigations into how diversity affects communities are too few and far between to provide any definitive answer to the question. So, together with colleagues in Singapore and the US, we set out to examine this very question in a series of studies – the results of which were recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

There is indeed evidence that diversity creates mistrust in communities. But diverse communities also provide an opportunity for people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to come into contact with each other, and we thought that these experiences would create a positive effect on people’s identities: specifically, the extent to which they identify with humanity, as a whole.

A human connection

This is one of the biggest and broadest forms of identity, which a human being can comprehend. A number of spiritual and philosophical traditions have upheld that believing you share a fundamental connection with other human beings – regardless of race, religion, sexuality or gender – is the sign of a mature mind.

My colleagues and I thought that living in diverse neighbourhoods might create opportunities to come into contact with different people again and again, thereby expanding a person’s sense of identity. As a result, people living in diverse neighbourhoods should be more helpful towards others. We examined this possibility in five empirical studies.

Lending a hand. Wonderwoman0731/Flickr, CC BY

In the first study, we took to Twitter to analyse the sentiments of tweets across the 200 largest metropolitan areas in the US. This was a somewhat basic, exploratory test of our hypothesis, using a large sample of data. In this study, we found that the likelihood that a tweet mentions words which suggest positivity, friendliness, helpfulness, or social acceptance was higher in a more diverse city.
 

Opening up

Encouraged by our findings, we then sought to examine how diversity of a zip code where people lived might affect people’s likelihood to offer help in the aftermath of a disaster, such as a terrorist attack. We used data from a website that the Boston Globe set up, where people could offer help to those stranded after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

After accounting for factors such as distance from the bombings, political diversity, religious diversity and the mean household income of these zip codes, we found that people who lived in more racially diverse zip codes were more likely to offer help to those in need after the bombings.

To take our investigation even further, we examined whether people living in more diverse countries would report that they had helped someone in the recent past. We used data from the Gallup World Poll in 2012, which asked more than 155,000 individuals in 146 countries to report whether they had helped a stranger in the recent past. Again, we found that people in more diverse countries were more likely to report that they had helped a stranger in the past month.
 

Expanding identities

These three studies seemed to provide converging evidence for our ideas, but we needed to understand whether this was because diversity expands people’s identities. From a scientific standpoint, this presented a big challenge. It would almost be impossible to conduct a real experiment where we allocate people to live in different neighbourhoods and then check whether this had an effect on their level of helpfulness.

A friendly face. blue.bone/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

So instead we borrowed a technique routinely used by social psychologist, called priming. Priming is a psychological method, used to activate a state of mind for people in an experiment. We primed people to think about neighbourhoods that were either diverse, or not. We made this allocation randomly, then examined how this affected their willingness to help.

We also measured whether this simple procedure of priming also altered their identities. We used a survey measure developed by other psychologists, which measures how much someone identifies with all of humanity. In two studies, we found that imagining living in a diverse neighbourhood expanded people’s identities, which in turn made them more willing to help a stranger.

These results don’t prove definitively that diversity is always a good thing. But they do offer an encouraging view of some of the benefits which diversity might bring to communities, given the way that people’s identities shift when they often encounter those who are different to them.

Some governments are already putting policies in place to make the most of these potential benefits. For example, in Singapore, each public housing apartment block maintains the same ratio of Chinese, Malay and Indian residents as exists in the wider population. This has prevented segregation and created diversity in neighbourhoods, which has led to a better society for everyone.

In ancient Indian texts, sages exhort people to view the whole world as one family. Our studies show that this isn’t a pipe dream – it’s a real possibility.

Jayanth Narayanan, Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership, IMD Business School
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Successive governments in Europe have impressive visions for the future of our cities. These reject the divisive urban model of earlier decades, where richer people moved to low-density, car-dependent suburbs, leaving inner cities predominantly to the poor.

In the sustainable cities of the future, the vision is to attract richer people back to city centres. This will reduce their need to travel and increase public transport use. Importantly, these movements are supposed to bring about more mixed communities of people from different walks of life, living alongside one another harmoniously.

To achieve this urban renaissance, the UK has, for example, been directing housing development towards brownfield sites in the core of cities, limiting greenfield development at the edge. It has also been among those pushing substantial investment through urban regeneration schemes in land preparation or infrastructure.

Sure enough, this has halted and in some cases reversed the population losses which core cities have experienced for decades as richer people have been attracted back to the centres. Yet poorer people are being pushed out; poverty is “suburbanising”. We have seen this pattern in the US and more recently in England, particularly London.

Scotland’s four largest cities are also experiencing this trend, as new data confirms. In Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee, the share of each city’s population living near the centre either stayed the same or rose between 2004 and 2016. At the same time, the proportion of poorer people has been falling (see graphs below).

Income-deprived population living in central city (%)

Non-deprived population living in central city (%)

The central area of Edinburgh has seen a loss of approximately 4,000 people in low income households over the period. In Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, where this trend has been identified before, the figure is approximately 6,000. For the smaller cities of Aberdeen and Dundee, the losses were around 400 and 700 respectively.
 

Segregation

What is driving this change? As city living has become more popular, poorer households are finding it harder to compete for housing. Social housing stock has fallen for decades, meaning those in poverty are having to rely more on renting privately. When cities attract wealthier people, landlords can charge rents that poorer people struggle to afford.

Meanwhile, recent welfare reforms have successively cut the housing benefits that subsidise rent payments for those on low incomes – at the same time as inequality levels have been rising more generally. The net result is that these people are pushed towards cheaper areas, away from the more central neighbourhoods.

Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Andy Ramdin, CC BY-SA

As in other countries, this suburbanisation of Scottish poverty looks to be a steady but largely hidden process. If it continues, the cities of the future will be far from the visions set out by policymakers and planners.

Instead, they will continue to be marked by segregation and deep division, only now with poorer households pushed to the edge. That has potentially serious implications for these people’s welfare, particularly their ability to access employment. It also threatens broader social cohesion. If politicians are serious about their visions for the future, it is time we recognised these trends and started talking about how to halt them.

Article was first published on The Conversation
 

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