Mumbai Is Drowning

About 21 million people live in Mumbai, India. Between 2 and 3 million of them live within a half a mile from the Arabian Sea. And climate scientists predict that 80 percent of the land they live on may be under water by 2050 due to global warming.

The entire city is already affected by extreme rains and flooding, with 50 residents having lost their lives in landslides during last year’s three-month-long monsoon season.

This week, The Atlantic reported that between 2001 and 2019, “rising ocean temperatures led to a 52 percent increase in the region’s cyclone frequency and a 150 percent increase in the number of very severe storms, while cyclone duration increased by 80 percent.”

“Extreme rainfall has increased in Mumbai and is likely to increase even more,” Subimal Ghosh from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, told Down to Earth, an Indian science magazine. “The prediction is in sync with the observed trend as well as the studies that we have been carrying out regarding the future pattern of rainfall.” Ghosh is one of the lead authors of a 2021 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Within the crammed city, full of buildings and pavement, “urban heat islands” are making the situation even worse.

The effect of such pockets of heat in Mumbai “often plays a duet and catapult[s] huge amount of rainfall, often within [a] short period, on the city and surrounding areas,” Ghosh said.

Urban heat islands “occur when cities replace natural land cover with dense concentrations of pavement, buildings, and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency. “This effect increases energy costs (e.g., for air conditioning), air pollution levels, and heat-related illness and mortality.”

And in the sprawling city of Mumbai, temperatures can vary as much as 48 degrees Fahrenheit, a study by IIT-Mumbai’s Center for Studies in Resources Engineering found.

The city, however, is trying to brace itself for what will come.

“For climate change action, we don’t have the luxury of time... we need to put it into fast-track action,” Aditya Thackeray, environment and climate change minister for Maharashtra (the state in which Mumbai is the capital), said in a statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

To that end, the city has included in its Climate Action Plan a way for different government departments to collaborate quickly. It has also built three massive floodwater tanks that are meant to drain water into the sea at low tide, and been installing what is hoped will be 6,000 “rainwater harvesting pits” in more than 1,000 municipal gardens to replenish groundwater and lessen flooding.

On top of that, Mumbai is working on building a desalination plant to convert seawater into fresh — because despite the steadily increasing rains, dams that supply the city do not always get enough rainfall. Access to clean water is more important than ever in a place that suffers extreme heat.

Mumbai was originally seven islands. In 1782, the city’s British governor began to connect them with multiple land reclamation projects, a process that was finally completed in 1845. Now we wait to see whether the water will reclaim the land in the next 30 years.