How to tackle complexity in urban climate resilience? Negotiating climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in India

RESEARCH ARTICLE How to tackle complexity in urban climate resilience? Negotiating climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in India Mahendra SethiID1,2,3*, Richa Sharma4, Subhakanta MohapatraID5, Shilpi Mittal3,6 1 Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2 Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, Germany, 3 Indian Society for Applied Research & Development, New Delhi, India, 4 India Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India, 5 School of Sciences, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi, India, 6 G.D. Goenka University, Gurugram, Haryana, India * m.sethi@campus.tu-berlin.de Abstract As the world’s population is expected to be over 2/3rd urban by 2050, climate action in cities is a growing area of interest in the inter-disciplines of development policy, disaster mitigation and environmental governance. The climate impacts are expected to be quite severe in the developing world, given its urban societies are densely packed, vastly exposed to natural elements while possessing limited capabilities. There is a notable ambiguity and complexity that inhibits a methodical approach in identifying urban resilience measures. The complexity is due to intersection of large number of distinct variables in climate geoscience (precipita- tion and temperature anomalies at different locations, RCPs, timeline), adaptation alterna- tives (approach, priority, intervention level) and urban governance (functional mandate, institutional capacity, and plans & policies). This research examines how disparate and

complex knowledge and information in these inter-disciplines can be processed for system- atic ‘negotiation’ to situate, ground and operationalize resilience in cities. With India as a case, we test this by simulating mid-term and long-run climate scenarios (2050 & 2080) to map regional climate impacts that shows escalation in the intensity of climate events like heat waves, urban flooding, landslides and sea level rise. We draw on suitable adaptation measures for five key urban sectors- water, infrastructure (including energy), building, urban planning, health and conclude a sleuth of climate resilience building measures for policy application through national/ state policies, local urban plans and preparation of city resil- ience strategy, as well as advance the research on ‘negotiated resilience’ in urban areas 1. Introduction Climate action in urban areas is a growing area of interest in the inter-disciplines of develop- ment policy, disaster mitigation and environmental governance [1–3]. By 2050, the world’s population is expected to be 68% urban [4], flaring concerns on how rapidly growing, yet PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253904 July 1, 2021 1 / 21 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Sethi M, Sharma R, Mohapatra S, Mittal S (2021) How to tackle complexity in urban climate resilience? Negotiating climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in India. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0253904. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0253904 Editor: Ghaffar Ali, Shenzhen University, CHINA

Received: October 12, 2020 Accepted: June 13, 2021 Published: July 1, 2021 Copyright: © 2021 Sethi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The first author acknowledges the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the generous research fellowship. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.