Blogs

This blog post originally appeared in WRI Insights.

Arriving in Katmandu days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, I watched footage of the storm's torrential rains batter southern Texas and saw heartbreaking images of families trapped on rooftops surrounded by toxic stormwater.

Here in Nepal, more than 13,000 kilometers (8,077 miles) away from Houston, the worst monsoon season in years is also inundating villages outside the capital....

Indian cities are going through a massive change. Decision-makers are rethinking urban design to make public infrastructure more useable and accessible. For instance, public bike share systems in Bhopal and Mysore have changed the way people commute; or the redesigning of streets in Bangalore has created a safe pedestrian network. In other cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bhubaneshwar, and Gurgaon, the public right of way is being reimagined taking pedestrians’ safety standards into account. In many of these cities, WRI India is playing an important role in this transformation.

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In March, the World Bank granted India US$8 million to design and pilot a carbon market. The funding announcement followed a meeting in New Delhi where 30 governments comprising the Bank’s carbon market group, the Partnership for Market Readiness, discussed their climate change mitigation actions.

India’s...

As part of an initiative to test the climate-proofing of development plans in India, WRI and NABARD have been studying the impacts of changing weather patterns in Cuddalore, a coastal district in Tamil Nadu. As a premier development bank in India, NABARD has been instrumental in providing technical and financial support to various development initiatives throughout the country. In Tamil Nadu, the Bank has been particularly contributing to alleviate the state’s dire water needs, through the promotion of participatory water management scheme in collaboration with Government of Tamil Nadu....

The urgency and complexity of the climate change challenge has been globally recognised. As developing countries grapple with the adverse effects of unfavorable climatic stressors, the global community is negotiating to meet the increasing demand for climate finance. This shift in the global conscience has facilitated a conducive environment for mainstreaming climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts, and integrating them firmly into countries’ overall developmental and growth agendas. There is far greater emphasis now on ensuring the climate proofing of development.

To that...

The Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) in May 2017 adopted the National Transit Oriented Development policy with the intention of providing a guiding document to states and cities that are adopting Transit Oriented Development (TOD) as an urban growth strategy. While Haryana, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Naya Raipur have TOD policies in place (refer to Table 1), states like Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, and cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Hubli-Dharwad, and Kochi are looking to adopt TOD as the growth strategy and...

From Bangalore to Bengaluru

In 1970, Bangalore had 1.6m people. Within the decade, the emergence and expansion of public sector institutions such as the Indian Space Research Organisation, Bharat Electrical Limited, and Hindustan Machine Tools caused a sudden growth spurt, followed quickly by more growth owing to the textile and information technology industries gaining a foothold in the city. By the 1980s, the population was growing at the rate of 45...

India’s power sector has ambitious targets. The Indian government has pledged to develop a renewable energy (RE) capacity of 175GW from the existing 57GW in the next five years, and promised electricity for all homes in the next two years, powering more than 300 million people. The realisation of these targets hinges heavily on a holistic electricity planning process.

At...

On Sunday, June 25th, Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, launched India’s first fully automated bicycle sharing system as part of its second anniversary of the much-talked-about Smart Cities program. This development comes just three weeks after Mysore launched the country’s first city level bicycle sharing project.

The Bhopal bicycle sharing system...

Karnataka is facing a water crisis. The adverse effects of climate variations experienced through fluctuations in temperature and precipitation have a significant bearing on the growth of the state economy. Farmers, in many parts of the state have faced loss of crops due to drought-like conditions owing to scarce rainfall and severe depletion of ground water.

Devendrappa, a farmer from Doddaballapur, a taluk in the Bangalore metropolitan area, says that people are now more aware of the impacts of climate change and what causes them than they were 20 years ago, when he took over...