Raghav Anand
Empowering India’s smaller cities and making them able to weather the worsening effects of climate change will be imperative as CO₂ emissions continue to rise.
India’s urbanization trajectory is set to be historic. With its urban population projected to increase by over 400 million people by 2050 (accounting for thirty-five percent of global urban growth during the same period), the country’s cities will continue to proliferate and swell. Urbanization is a key driver of India’s emissions, which stood at 3.8 billion tons of CO₂ in 2022, making it the third-largest emitter in the world (Global Carbon Atlas, 2023). The sustainability of India’s urban transition is therefore of global relevance, and has the potential to avoid locking-in vast quantities of carbon emissions – particularly in its rapidly growing smaller and medium cities (SMCs), where today’s decisions will establish development pathways for the coming decades.
If these growing cities follow the high-carbon trajectories of their larger counterparts – relying on energy-intensive construction, unregulated sprawl, and fossil-fuel-driven cooling – India’s emissions will surge. Conversely, a well-planned urban transition could lock in low-carbon growth, avoiding as much as one billion tons of CO₂ emissions by 2050 (IEA, 2022). Meanwhile, climate change continues unabated, making these cities extremely prone to its devastating effects. India ranks as the seventh-most vulnerable country to climate change, making a two-pronged approach to climate action – focusing on both mitigation and adaptation – crucial to ensuring this transition balances economic interest with climate considerations.
Empowering India’s Smaller Cities: SMCs
Early headway in urban climate action has occurred predominantly in large-scale metropolises like Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, leaving India’s SMCs in the lurch. The majority of India’s urban growth and associated emissions will come from these SMCs over the coming decades. The Coalition for Urban Transitions estimates that over half of India’s climate mitigation potential through to 2050 comes from cities with less than one million inhabitants – small cities by Indian standards. The number of cities with over a million people is expected to rise from forty-two in 2014 to sixty-eight by 2030. Places like Indore, Surat, Bhubaneswar, and Kochi are growing at breakneck speed, often absorbing rural migrants displaced by climate change and economic shifts.