Implications of land use transitions and climate change on local flooding in urban areas: An assessment of 42 Indian cities
Graphical abstract
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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2023, Land Use PolicyCitation Excerpt :A rise in sea level has also impacted many coastal cities in India, such as Mumbai (Pramanik, 2017), Chennai (Ramachandran et al., 2017) and Kochi (Murali and Kumar, 2015). Growth in population and changes in land use, including the conversion of wetlands into residential, commercial, and industrial land use (Sadashivam and Tabassu, 2016; Avashia and Garg, 2020) have further exacerbated climate-related risks in Indian cities (Ranger et al., 2011; Gupta, 2020). The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (1992) of India was a milestone for urban development and governance in Indian cities.