Mumbai More than four months after the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) announced the Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), which ambitiously aims to make Mumbai a ‘net zero’ city by 2050, the city is lagging behind in the implementation.
The corporation has not yet constituted a climate cell, as mandated by the MCAP, to coordinate various stakeholder departments, within and outside of the BMC. The cell is proposed to be headed by the municipal commissioner, with day-to-day operations overseen by the deputy municipal commissioner (environment & climate change) — a position which is currently vacant.
Postponement of BMC elections, a change of leadership in the BMC’s environment cell, and the ensuing political turmoil in Maharashtra have all contributed to the MCAP’s delay in implementation, according to officials in the know.
When contacted for a comment on Wednesday, additional municipal commissioner Sanjeev Kumar, who heads the BMC’s environment cell, did not speak in detail. “The work is ongoing. The cell will be established in a couple of weeks,” he said. However, multiple officials in the BMC confirmed to Hindustan Times that negligible progress has been made in implementing the MCAP’s ‘priority actions’ for 2022, which are now likely to be pushed to 2023.
For example, the BMC in 2022 was slated to conduct an assessment of potential land and roof stock on municipal property which can be used for rooftop solar, so that 100% of electricity use by BMC and other municipal buildings can come from renewable sources by 2030. This year, the BMC is also supposed to identify available land parcels and brownfields in areas exposed to high heat, for increasing vegetation cover as a mitigating measure. Yet another priority action was to organise capacity building of health workers in identifying and treating heat-related illnesses.
The BMC’s climate agenda for 2022 also involved conducting a ward-wise assessment of air pollution hotspots, and a health risk assessment to identify communities who are most exposed to air pollution. The corporation was also to update its tree census parameters to capture carbon sequestration and biodiversity, along with demarcation of biodiversity hotspots within the city using GIS methodology. It is presently unclear when these steps will now be taken.
A recently retired BMC employee, who occupied a deputy municipal commissioner post and has been privy to the MCAP’s progress, told Hindustan Times on the condition of anonymity that these ‘priority actions’ have taken a setback due the delay in BMC elections and the political turmoil in the state.
“In some cases, preliminary meetings have been held between departments, but on ground the actions have not materialised due to events that were out of our control. The position of DMC (environment cell) has also changed hands in the last two months, and is currently vacant,” they added.
Yet another official, from the solid waste management (a key stakeholder in the MCAP), said, “We have made some progress in terms of planning the constitution of the committee. Regular meetings have been held and a file has also been sent for vetting to the BMC’s treasury department. But because there is no overarching body yet to coordinate between different stakeholders, the priority actions have been delayed. We will have to wait until the climate cell is formed so that new timelines can be set for these.”
Moreover, the Maharashtra Council on Climate Change (MCCC), which was constituted by the state government last year, and which is supposed to appraise the climate cell’s activities every six months, has not met even once since being formed on November 29.
The MCCC, which is to be headed by the chief minister and deputy chief minister, does not currently exist in entirety as the new Eknath Shinde-led government is yet to form a cabinet of ministers.
Other members of the MCCC include ministers for revenue, urban development, water resources, industries, energy, transport, agriculture, rural development, forests, disaster management, and environment. The chief and principal secretaries of the state are also members.