World Bank – Towards Resilient and Prosperous Cities in India

The World Bank argues that India’s next several decades of urban growth create an unusually large opportunity because much of the infrastructure that will serve future urban populations has not yet been built. The conventional takeaway is that Indian cities need substantially more investment in climate-resilient infrastructure. The more interesting point is that resilience is cheaper to build into urbanisation before infrastructure, housing and land-use patterns become locked in than to retrofit once vulnerability has already been created. With India’s urban population projected to approach 951 million by 2050, decisions made through ordinary planning, housing, transport, drainage and infrastructure systems will become climate decisions whether they carry that label or not. This shifts adaptation from a specialist environmental programme toward a question of how mainstream urban investment is conceived and financed. For shared resilience, the implication is that climate resilience may increasingly depend on institutions outside the traditional climate sector because urban development decisions determine who becomes exposed long before a disaster occurs. The question is whether India’s cities can embed resilience into routine investment decisions quickly enough, or whether climate finance will continue arriving mainly after vulnerable patterns of growth have already been established.

Read the World Bank report