Integration of emission reduction and environmental management goals for sustainable urban development

Abstract

Urbanisation and urban population growth have together been exerting pressure on the resources available while causing environmental pollution and resource degradation. These issues have led to a ‘green agenda’ that has been customarily dealt with in the form of assessing ecological footprint of cities, environmental impact analyses, and carrying-capacity assessments; the development/management plans for regions/city-regions are prepared based on these assessments. Such environmental management plans identify the actions/interventions that mitigate the likely impacts of urban development activities on resources, ecology, and environment. The understanding of climate change and its impact on the human society in the past decade has set a somewhat different global agenda with a focus on: (a) reducing green house gases, (b) instituting adaptation mechanisms, and (c) undertaking mitigation measures. The ultimate objectives of both these agenda are not mutually exclusive; rather, they can be ‘mutually reinforcing’ than being ‘autonomous’. There exists potential for their integration at urban/city-region level. Green management actions can reinforce the ‘emission reduction agenda’, if they were well cast based on the synergistic linkages between the two. This chapter attempts to bring out the possible integration between the approaches of ‘green agenda’ and ‘emission reduction agenda’, and it identifies the areas where both of them potentially converge. It also brings out the approaches of ‘Compact City’ in the UK and ‘Smart Growth’ in the USA with reference to such integration as a relevant case for replication in India, albeit to a good extent in metropolitan and mega cities like Mumbai.