» Climate Change Adaptation in Mumbai, India

by Emily Boyd, Aditya Ghosh, and Maxwell T. Boykoff

Chapter 8 in The Urban Climate Challenge: Rethinking the Role of Cities in the Global Climate Regime (Edited by C. Johnson, N. Toly, H. Schroeder)

Routledge Press (2015)

Bombay’s fate us solidly, inextricably, linked to India’s fate, much as the city would like to pretend otherwise.
– Mehta, Maximum City, 2004

This chapter connects the more formal and emergent climate adaptation governance regime operating at multiple calls to everyday urban space, in the case of reoccurring flood events in Mumbai (Bombay), India. As the author Suketu Mehta describes in the quote above, the collective climate future of Mumbai links to that of the larger story arc of India. The chapter examines how this relationship scales up to the international community and extends to other cities and contexts in relation to climate adaptation governance.

This chapter seeks to explore the idea that in the urban context, unequal geographies, rooted in historical socio-political and environmental context – coupled with international political representations of climate change – may ultimately exacerbate the challenge of adaptation to climate change and illuminate ongoing considerations of consequences from the new carbon economy. Read more …