IT professional Nagarjun Kandukuru, 51, looks out of the window of his Bannerghatta Road home in Bengaluru and watches as his 16-year-old son cycles off to music class. The family has never owned a car. Kandukuru himself uses a motorcycle to commute to work. “Poorly maintained roads and the traffic make me anxious, and that translates into bad moods at home. Good transport is as basic as air and water,” he says. A city’s competitiveness, he adds, should include quality-of-life measures beyond monetary terms.

Recently, the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was held under the theme, "Peace with Nature." One could translate this to a “live and let live” perspective towards the natural world. Biodiversity conservation can be seen as embodying this spirit, encompassing all living organisms, from individual species to entire ecosystems.

A year ago, on an unusually warm November morning, Freedom Park in Bengaluru was abuzz with visitors gathered around several large posters. The posters announced that Bengaluru's top leadership will be launching the city’s first-ever climate action plan. With climate enthusiasts, civil society members, government representatives and students in attendance, the events at Freedom Park got the ball rolling on the implementation of this climate action plan.

This is the second blog in a three-part series that presents the climate action planning process for three cities in Maharashtra. Read the first blog in the series here.

Despite efforts to enable climate action, a range of obstacles, including challenges of perception, limit their effectiveness. Climate change tends to be perceived as a distant problem, and climate action often takes a disaster mitigation approach. There is a need to shift from this approach, of recovery post disaster, to preemptive risk reduction and resilience building.