Four from India in top 20 water vulnerable megacities

Just because your city suffered floods doesn’t mean you have water. Ask Chennai where 11 million are going without water.

Chennai’s severe water crisis this year is “one step worse” than Cape Town’s in 2018 — where reservoirs dropped to dangerously low levels, because emergency measures had to be taken to ensure even basic drinking water for residents, says Alexis Morgan, lead at WWF’s Global Water Stewardship.

Morgan says, “What is perhaps even more perverse is that mere years ago, Chennai was exposed to devastating floods and experienced some of the wettest conditions in many years resulting in some 1.8 million people being displaced, the loss of over 500 lives, and economic damage over $3 billion. From too wet to too dry in a matter of four years.”

Chennai’s situation though is “unsurprising”, Morgan says. In an evaluation of 400 cities globally in 2018 with focus on megacities facing high combined levels of water scarcity — recent and projected drought, Chennai emerged in top position as the city facing the most severe water scarcity and drought. There are four Indian cities in the top 20 megacities with populations above 10 million. Chennai aside, Kolkata ranks at number 2, Mumbai at 11 and Delhi at 15. The study drew on The Nature Conservancy’s ‘Urban Water Blueprint’ and used WWF’s ‘Water Risk Filter’, global water management initiatives.

Large cities, mostly located along banks of large rivers, are vulnerable because for the most part, the river-systems are “vastly over-allocated and mismanaged”, Morgan notes. Drought to flooding are the “front edge of climate change”. Add to that the loss of wetlands, especially in a city such as Kolkata, and the looming crisis of floods and depleting water sources are evident. The world has lost 35% of its wetlands since 1970 and is losing them three times faster than forests, reports have noted.

Wetlands are key. Over half of Kolkata’s waste water once drained into the East Kolkata Wetlands without any need to treat the sewage. But as the wetlands shrink, the city, activists have time and again cited, loses its natural waste water tank, and in the absence of enough sewage treatment plants, the waste water goes straight into the river. A Ramsar protected site, the EKW was such an efficient system of canals and ponds that treated the city’s waste water that the sewage treatment plants were not sanctioned here under the Ganga Action Plan.

EKW was described as a “rare example of environmental protection and development management” by the Ramsar Convention, but such is the degree of encroachment that the National Green Tribunal on May 30 directed fencing of the site. The state may also have to reply to why a 2011 order on not issuing any further no-objection certificates for construction was revoked in 2017.