There is no country in the world that is as vulnerable, on so many dimensions, to climate change as India is - Jairam Ramesh on the publication of Climate Change and India: A 4×4 Assessment, November 2010
Our vision
is for cities where all women and men, young and old, are empowered to mobilise their knowledge and creativity – and work together across all of society for sustainable and just development, environmental protection and meeting the challenges of climate change.
This vision embraces our core value of respect for every person, their lives and their human capacities to build a better today and tomorrow.
Our mission
is to harness the democratic potential of education together with digital photography and filmmaking, mobile telephony, mobile computing and other Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for the empowerment of all the people in the development process.
Our holistic approach is aimed at especially enabling women of all ages and from all backgrounds to:
Gain deeper understanding of complex urban realities that affect their lives – rapid urbanisation, environment, climate change, health and social justice
Become confident users of digital media and ICTs
Document their life circumstances through photos, video, voice recordings and writing
Create new knowledge
Build social networks on the internet for knowledge sharing and joint problem solving – across cities and across socio-economic divides
Express themselves creatively through digital media
Be seen and heard by society
Apply their knowledge to make a difference at the local level
Participate in social change processes and collaborative governance for equitable, resilient and sustainable cities
Develop their potential as innovators and entrepreneurs – and create new ideas, products and services for inclusive and sustainable development in Indian cities.
The government has just announced a new India Inclusive Innovation Fund to be operational by July 2012. The Fund aims to ‘back enterprises in developing innovative solutions for people at the bottom 500 million in India’. Supporting enterprise by women from poorer sections of the society to activate their knowledge, ideas and economic potential should be a central part of such an initiative.
Old 
Delhi reminds us of a history of women designing and planning cities
Old Delhi, originally called Shah Jahanabad, was established in 1650 AD by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, and designed by his daughter Jahanara Begum Sahib who also made significant contributions to the landscaping of the new capital.
Indian cities in an overheating world
With ever increasing densities, cities will be the hardest hit by climate change. We have to have robust local level responses to climate change if we are to have any real impact - Joan Clos, Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, UN-Habitat Global Report on Human Settlements 2011 – Cities and Climate Change
India is urbanising at an extreme scale and pace and all of her cities are vulnerable to climate change.
As a huge number of people migrate to cities from rural areas, India’s city population will nearly double from today’s 34 to close to 60 crore (600 million) people in the next two decades – in an overheating world. By 2030, there will be 13 cities with more than 40 lakh (4 million) people, and six megacities will have populations of 1 crore (10 million) or more.
The National Capital Territory of Delhi and adjacent urban areas in neighbouring states are already the world’s second largest urban agglomeration.
As across the whole country, the climate in Delhi is showing more and more variability and greater extremes.
Weather extremes are becoming the norm
In the summer of 2010, Northern India experienced temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius which claimed hundreds of lives in what is believed to be the hottest summer since records began in the country in the late 1880s.
In April 2010, Delhi recorded its highest maximum temperature of 44 degrees Celsius, at eight degrees above normal for this time of year. And 2010 was no isolated extreme – 2009 also saw temperatures soar and brought the driest monsoon in nearly four decades. 2010′s summer heat was followed by very heavy monsoon rains and widespread flooding. This brought with it a severe and prolonged mosquito season with high incidence of dengue and chikungunya fevers. The winter season that followed was very cold. Soaring food prices and food insecurity, in which climate change also plays a significant role, are creating hardship for people in the city.
May 2011 saw temperatures in Delhi even exceed 2010′s records for this time of year. But in contrast to last year, Delhi, together with Haryana and Chandigarh, experienced the highest rainfall deficiency in the country from June to August (-32%). Then the statistics were almost evened out by one extreme downpour in September which caused heavy flooding! A long-lasting cold wave right across India is breaking century-old temperature records this winter of 2011-12.
The worsening climate-driven realities of life in Delhi are coinciding with the city’s rush towards becoming one of the world’s ‘maximum cities’.
Urbanisation, combined with escalating climate change, confronts India with complex challenges on a scale that no democracy has ever had to face. Urban life could become much tougher. The country’s transformation to sustainability will be won or lost in cities.
Climate change and environmental degradation pose major threats to the health and well-being of urban populations and engender huge social and economic costs. We already know that climate change will – directly or indirectly – impact on everything as the 21st century progresses.
To meet these challenges will require a holistic transformation that encompasses culture, society, and the economy as well as science and technology infrastructure.
Protection and enhancement of the environment, climate change resilience, education and public health must become fully integrated in the development process during all of its phases, they cannot be relegated to some distant point in the future.
One of the obstacles to achieving integration is a common perception of inevitable trade-offs between development on the one hand, and environmental protection and climate change mitigation/adaptation on the other. However, this does not necessarily follow. A supportive policy environment and creative innovation can make these efforts not only more affordable, but they can in fact enhance growth, employment and inclusive development.
Inclusive and sustainable development requires democratic co-operation between all parts of society. It equally requires co-operation between all domains of human knowledge, including traditional and citizen knowledge, socio-cultural disciplines, architecture and urban planning, art, economics, medical knowledge systems, science, technology and more.
The complexity of change creates entirely new challenges to human knowledge and creativity. How can we gain up-to-date knowledge about our fast changing world and the unprecedented transformation of the human condition? How can we respond to rapid shifts, new threats and unpredictability? These questions can not – in principle – be adequately addressed by using only traditional, top-down and tightly focused research and planning methods.
The situation calls on us to broaden our ideas of what knowledge and creativity are, where they reside, how they are produced and how they can be used for strong sustainability.
Meeting the challenges of the 21st century requires collaborative knowledge systems that can scale up and generate democratic knowledge ecologies. These will facilitate the open and equitable flow of knowledge, ideas and information between individuals, communities and institutions, and catalyse creative action.
Recently, a name and a symbol have been suggested for the new cultural era we find ourselves in – ‘sustainism’ (click on them to find out more).
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