Ecological Footprints of Cities in India

Urban expansion is almost always over the best agricultural land, because it is usually easy land to build on. This takes away the most suitable soils from agriculture. Urban and industrial developments sometimes compete with agriculture for scarce water resources, with agriculture generally being the loser. Felling and over-exploitation of forests for urban and industrial development destroys natural ecological balance. Intensive agriculture destroys the natural ecology by replacing diversity with mono-cultures, and by the use of pesticides and herbicides. Wetland and coastal reclamation destroys an ecology that is impossible to replace, and bring harm to the sensitive ecosystems. An urban environment is complex primarily because of rapidly changing variables such as socio-economic and demographic indicators, land-use patterns, resource demand and utilization patterns, lifestyle changes etc. In the light of climate change, a new layer of uncertainty is added in terms of changes in precipitation, temperature and occurrence of extreme events. Furthermore, there are scale mismatches; in terms of the time scales over which policymakers and urban planners operate, and scales over which projected impacts of environmental decisions, degradation, climate variability and change will manifest. Also policies and developmental initiatives in cities should enable urban systems to adjust to changes as and when they happen and accordingly respond in a way that maintains their original structure and function. It is to be noted that out of 55 cities in India having population over a million, 18 are in coastal states. Major challenge for cities in the face of rapid population growth is to maintain sustainability within the social, economic and environmental dimensions. Urban systems are at risk to different kind of hazards. Several factors contribute to the urban risk profile. Present paper purports to examine the dynamics of urban environment, sustainability and development in the context of changing global environmental changes.