As the new Mahayuti government was sworn in on Thursday evening at Mumbai’s historic Azad Maidan, the temperature hovered around 32°C, a sharp drop of nearly five points over the previous day but still quite high for the month. It had nothing to do with the sizzling negotiations between the alliance partners of the Mahayuti or the rising infuriation of Eknath Shinde who was forced to be deputy to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP. Quite a role reversal there. Shinde, who did not want to listen to his party leader, Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray, in 2022 had to meekly comply with the BJP’s high command.
There was a haze around the city too. There has been for a few days in the lead-up to the swearing-in of Fadnavis as the chief minister, and Shinde and Ajit Pawar as deputy chief ministers. This is not to suggest that the haze had anything to do with the non-transparent and protracted negotiations between the alliance partners but it hung heavy. Sections of the city’s skyline disappeared as if in a 1960s Bollywood black-and-white whodunit, its spanking new bridges and roads in the sea were lost to sight and morning light was so listless and dull that the filters in posh phones could not help.
The haze might lift and the air might turn cooler as December rolls on. The political landscape may clear up too. We will see if Shinde, diminished and hurting, has tricks up his sleeve to show who’s the boss or the duo of Fadnavis-Ajit Pawar, immensely experienced and shrewd players of the political game, are able to pull the rug from beneath Shinde’s feet. But it’s high time that they all move into the governance mode now.
What does the December heat and haze have to do with the just-concluded Conference of Parties or COP29, the annual climate summit of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which just ended in Baku, Azerbaijan? Everything. This edition of the climate conference was to decide, among other things, the amount of finance that the developed countries or the Global North would contribute so that the developing nations could best meet their targets on mitigation and adaptation. The latter demanded $1.3 trillion; the former haggled hard and settled on $300 billion – from 2035. That’s a decade away.
Cities are sites of climate change — globally, nearly 70% of the emissions are from cities – and also centres of climate change-related extreme weather events such as heatwaves, high and unusual hot days, intense rainfall and flash floods, poor and dipping air quality with the haze hanging so heavy over cities that visibility on roads has been down to 20-30 metres. Cities are also where the largest numbers of vulnerable people — poor, migrants, outdoor workers, slum dwellers — live in large numbers and in high densities, and are the worst affected by extreme weather events.
Worldwide, over a billion impoverished people live in informal urban settlements. They need to be foregrounded at climate conferences, especially at the global COP. India’s cities too have seen days of intense heat, flooding and air pollution that have become life-threatening for all but especially so for the most vulnerable; every year sees deaths related to these. In Mumbai alone, four people died in rainfall-floods only in September. And lest it’s forgotten, nearly a thousand had died in the flood in August 2017 when one day’s rain on August 29 was equal to 11 days of average daily monsoon.
Climate change is real — most so for the urban poor who bear the brunt of extreme events despite their carbon footprint being the lowest given their lower levels of consumption, use of public transport, and so on. Quite a few are climate warriors too — waste pickers, sorters, recyclers — whose work has clear mitigation dimensions. In Mumbai, as has been documented, nearly 6.5 million live in slums that are barely hospitable; the SRA buildings that replaced some slums in the past 25 years are equally uninhabitable with crush-load densities, buildings that allow no air or light in, and few open spaces around.
Cities were made centre-stage at COP in the last two editions but cities are hardly even; the disparities and inequalities of income, wealth, work, space, civic services are more glaring than ever. On the one hand, millions make-do in Mumbai’s slums; on the other, the city showed 92 billionaires this year making it Asia’s billionaire capital. The capability of these two sets of Mumbaikars to face climate events differs vastly. For the better-off and billionaires, they are an inconvenience; for the vulnerable, they could mean the difference between life and death.
These disparities are difficult to foreground at global conferences but the COP structure does not even attempt to discuss the urban poor in the context of climate change despite the large numbers. In fact, this time, COP29 was held in a nation that lives off fossil fuels; it’s the third straight conference in a row to be held in a petro-state and to which fossil fuel industry executives thronged. Yes, this is how compromised the COP process has become. This has led many to log out and question its very purpose.
There is no doubt that the COP process needs to be transformed, reimagined and restructured to include the concerns and demands of the many countries of the Global South, especially their poor. Yet, it happens to be the best platform available to engage with the developed world and get them to pay up for their emissions over the decades. However, we cannot afford to wait — and this is where local action will prove to be the most decisive difference in the coming years.
Mumbai needs politicians who do not merely outsource climate action plans or create departments to tackle heat and air pollution, but who understand the symbiotic connection that climate change has with every aspect of the urban life, especially of the poor and vulnerable; as do other cities of Maharashtra that are fast-tracking their development on the Mumbai model pretending that climate change is not already upon us. The heat and haze need to be addressed — short-term and long-term. Fadnavis has his task cut out as the glow of the swearing-in day fades.
Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column
