Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 95, June 2020, 104571
Land Use Policy

Implications of land use transitions and climate change on local flooding in urban areas: An assessment of 42 Indian cities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104571Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Land use and climate change effect urban hydrology leading to increased flooding.

  • Rainfall and flooding events increased by 0.3 and 16.5 % over 1991–2015 respectively.

  • Built space increased by 21 %, while green and open space decreased by 5.8 and 3.7 %.

  • By 2050, cities will face more flooding past RCP2.6 under current urban growth trends.

  • Cities need to preserve the land uses that act as a sponge – the green, open and blue spaces.

Abstract

Urban development induced land transitions affect urban hydrology, resulting in increased flooding risks. Climate change-related precipitation changes are an added complexity to the flood risks of cities. This study examines the role of land use changes in determining the occurrence of urban flooding events across 42 Indian cities under current and future climate change scenarios. Landsat images for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2017 have been processed using a hybrid classification technique to determine the land use shares for all cities. A typical event-count study using newspaper archives has been conducted to create a flooding event database. A multilevel model employing logistic mixed-effects approach was used. Future projections of the occurrence of flooding events for nine models under three climate change-related Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)—2.6, 4.5, and 8.5—and three urban development scenarios have been carried out. The results suggest that cities should preserve the land uses that act as a sponge—the green, open and blue spaces. As these spaces decrease, the projected flooding events increase. Under the RCP 2.6 scenario, the number of flooding events is significantly lower (95 % confidence) than under RCPs 4.5 and 8.5. The expected flooding occurrences between RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 are not significantly different (95 % confidence) for many scenarios, suggesting that Indian cities should aim for a world temperature increase of below 2 °C, or devastating consequences are imminent. This study highlights the need for Indian cities to undertake integrated spatial planning measures for a resilient, sustainable urban future.

Introduction

Cities are the hubs of economic growth. Currently, 55 % of the global population resides in urban areas, and this number is projected to reach almost 68 % by 2050 (UN, 2018).

Majority of this growth is expected to be from Asia and Africa. Almost 31 % of India’s population lives in urban areas as per the national census data (Census of India, 2011). This number is projected to increase up to 52 % by 2050 (UN, 2018). Clearly, the cities in India are expected to expand to accommodate this population increase.

Urban areas worldwide and specifically in developing countries have been experiencing unsustainable, rapid growth since approximately 2000, which has led to increased fragility of the urban environment (Hernantes et al., 2018); (Zhang, 2016); (Seto et al., 2012). Air pollution, waste management, polluted water bodies and rivers, impacts on biodiversity of local flora and fauna, habitat fragmentation, and pressure on the urban and peri-urban resources are some of the common environmental problems that must be resolved by cities; climate change is an added complication.

Cities are at the forefront in the climate change debate because they contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are vulnerable to its impacts. Coupled with urbanization, the local environments are further stressed because of the changing global and regional climate. Thus, discerning the relations between urbanization, current local environmental change, and accelerating climate change is crucial (Revi et al. (2014)). Cities and climate change-related interlinkages were indicated in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in, 2007. The report by Working Group I outlined the impacts of climate change, and four were relevant to cities: heat waves, heavy precipitation events, drought conditions, and increased frequency of cyclones (IPCC, 2007). The IPCC special report on 1.5 °C warming levels indicates that South Asian countries including India are predominantly vulnerable to multiple, overlapping hazards (IPCC, 2018). Thus, understanding integrated urban development and climate change impacts on developing country cities is necessary.

This paper aims to assess the effect of land use transitions on the occurrence of flooding events across 42 Indian metropolises. The study uses land use change between 1991 and 2017 and flooding events between 1991 and 2017 for future projections under climate change and urban development scenarios up to 2050.

Section snippets

Urban flooding and changing climate

Flooding is the most frequently occurring disaster globally and is responsible for 43 % of the total events recorded between 1998 and 2017, impacting 2 billion people and resulting in US$656 billion worth of economic losses (Wallemacq et al., 2018). Cities are at risk of heavy precipitation events that lead to flash floods and riverine flooding. These events are expected to be exacerbated by climate change. Local flooding or flash flooding events occur when intense rain falls over a small area

Methodological framework

This study examines the relationship between changing land use patterns and flooding events; thus, the crucial variables are land use shares, occurrence of flooding, and amount of rainfall leading to a flooding event. Fig. 1 describes the methodological framework for the study. The land use data, precipitation data, and flooding data are fed into a multilevel logistic regression model. The model is further employed to project the expected flooding events under various urban development and

Model results

First, the unconditional mean model (UCM)/null model has been estimated. The ICC1 and ICC2 estimates are 0.116 and 0.919, indicating that 11.6 % of the total variation can be attributed to city-level characteristics for the models with 42 cities (clusters). The ICC2 of 0.919 suggests that within-city variance is much smaller than between-city variance, that is, the means of one class/city significantly differ from the means of another class/city, establishing the need for multilevel modeling.

Conclusion

With the increasing urban population and the increasing land transitions to house these individuals, cities are at an increased risk of the consequences of climate change. This study investigates the impacts of land transitions on local urban flooding under various climate change scenarios across 42 cities in India. The study establishes an empirical link of flooding events to changes in land use shares ceteris paribus by using mixed-effects models. The results suggest a significant

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Vidhee Avashia: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Amit Garg: Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing.

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