Aromar Revi

Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS)

This Summary for Urban Policymakers is synthesised from SR1.5, the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and relevant supporting research. It builds on thirty years of science from the IPCC and climate diplomacy. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2015 within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate...

This paper considers the needed adaptation and mitigation agenda for cities in India – where the urban population is likely to grow by around 500 million over the next 50 years. It considers the likely changes that climate change will bring in temperature, precipitation and extreme rainfall, drought, river and inland fl ooding, storms/storm surges/...

This report takes stock of the current climate finance landscape in India, along with the estimated financing requirements, enabling conditions and macro policy instruments to achieve national 1.5oC and 2oC goals. Climate change will negatively affect India’s economy leading to annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) loss of 3 per cent to 10 per cent b...

There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in...

The IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report is based on the three Working Group contributions to the AR6 as well as on the three Special Reports prepared in this assessment cycle.

The United Nations (UN) 1977 Water Conference at Mar del Plata (MDP) sought to avoid a water crisis of global dimensions by 2000 and to ensure an adequate supply of good quality water to meet socioeconomic needs. While much has been achieved, the MDP goals are not yet realised. Unsafe, or perceived to be unsafe, drinking water still affects at leas...

The United Nations (UN) 1977 Water Conference at Mar del Plata (MDP) sought to avoid a water crisis of global dimensions by 2000 and to ensure an adequate supply of good-quality water to meet socio-economic needs. While much has been achieved, the MDP goals are not yet realized. Unsafe, or perceived to be unsafe, drinking water still affects at lea...

2015 was a seismic moment for urban stakeholders around the world. A coalition of policymakers, academics and practitioners came together to successfully advocate for an urban goal to be included in the UN Sustainable Development Goal framework. Although the value of a place-based approach to development has been demonstrated by a number of cities...

What the Latest Science on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability means for Cities and Urban Areas, offers a concise and accessible urban-focused distillation of the IPCC Working Group II Report. The scale, reach, and complexity of contemporary urbanisation can compound the risks from climate change for cities. Cities and urban areas have a critica...

The Summary for Urban Policymakers (SUP) series distils the IPCC reports into targeted summaries to inform action at the city and regional scale. This third volume in the series, What the Latest Science on Climate Change Mitigation Means for Cities and Urban Areas offers a concise and accessible distillation of the IPCC Working Group III Report for...

Our planet is rapidly urbanizing. Research has recognized the complexity of city-driven dynamics, but our political realities have yet to catch up. A new narrative of sustainable urban development must become central to global policymaking to help humanity respond to the most pressing social and environmental challenges.

This commentary from the Journal Editorial Board sets out the research agenda for the journal and invites contributions. We want to elicit and synthesize research- and practice-based knowledge toward the goal of resilient, equitable cities in a world with less than 1.5°C of warming, focusing on the transformational change needed to achieve this goa...

The feasibility assessment (FA) presents a systematic framework to assess adaptation and mitigation options organised by system transitions. This Cross-Chapter Box assessed the feasibility of 23 adaptation options across six dimensions: economic, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, environmental-ecological, and geophysical to identify fac...

Sustainable urban systems (SUS) science is a new science integrating work across established and emerging disciplines, using diverse methods, and addressing issues at local, regional, national, and global scales. Advancing SUS requires the next generation of scholars and practitioners to excel at synthesis across disciplines and possess the skills...

The paper highlights some of the key concerns across the sectors of school, higher and teacher education. A few potential research themes that can help problematise the issues raised have been identified. An emphasis is laid on the need to build on practice-based repositories of knowledge, curricular framing and pedagogic strategies. Examining the...

Cities are projected to hold two-thirds of the world's population by 2050 under a period of intensifying climate change. Ensuring sustainable, climate-resilient, and equitable cities will require moving beyond incremental adaptation to transformative adaptation. What does transformative adaptation mean for cities, and how can it be achieved, partic...

Over the last century, mean annual temperatures increased by ~1°C. UNFCCC has proposed to limit warming below 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels. A study was conducted on rice (C3 pathway) and maize (C4 pathway) over Tamil Nadu using DSSAT to understand the climate change impacts with projected temperature increase of 1.5°C.The future climate...

Water availability mediates rural and urban development through impacts on sectors such as agriculture and industry. Recognising that climatic risks attenuate this water availability, various adaptation options have been implemented in the water sector. To inform adaptation prioritisation, it is critical to assess the growing literature on adaptati...

In many domains we see a proliferation of claims made about how we can predict and measure the future city, how we make visible its form and shape its settlement. This paper synthesises contemporary debates in data analytics, anthropology, geography and the history of urban thought to consider the context of such claims making around urban futures...

The Paris Agreement put adaptation prominently on the global climate action agenda. Despite a surge in research and praxis-based knowledge on adaptation, a critical policy roadblock is synthesizing and assessing this burgeoning evidence. We develop an approach to assess the multidimensional feasibility of adaptation options in a robust and transpar...

Recent evidence shows that climate change is leading to irreversible and existential impacts on vulnerable communities and countries across the globe. Among other effects, this has given rise to public debate and engagement around notions of climate crisis and emergency. The Loss and Damage (L&D) policy debate has emphasized these aspects over the...

Urban science seeks to understand the fundamental processes that drive, shape and sustain cities and urbanization. It is a multi/transdisciplinary approach involving concepts, methods and research from the social, natural, engineering and computational sciences, along with the humanities. This report is intended to convey the current “state of the...

In this study, a quantitative assessment of observed aridity variations over the semiarid regions of India is performed for the period 1951–2005 using a dimensionless ratio of annual precipitation (P) and potential evapotranspiration (PET), estimated from five different observed gridded precipitation data sets. The climatological values and changes...

What follows here is the Panel’s call for a global urban science. This call takes the three elements of this phrase in a different light from the often popular and at times unnuanced use if the terms. It is ‘global’ in a cosmopolitan sense as pertaining to and reaching out worldwide, irrespective of socio-economic status to the variety of urban con...

This chapter discusses how the global economy and socio-technical and socio-ecological systems can transition to 1.5°C-consistent pathways and adapt to warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. In the context of systemic transitions, the chapter assesses adaptation and mitigation options, including carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and potential so...

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...

Two years after the creation of the SDGs, the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sendai framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the world stands at a crossroads in terms of implementation and financing of a new twenty-first-century SDG-based social compact to leave ‘no one’ and ‘no place’ behind. A series of bold measures, visionary leadership, skilled...

Given the far-reaching impact of urbanisation across the globe, the Editor of Urbanisation, Aromar Revi, calls for a better understanding of cities as systems and of the challenges and opportunities of sustainable urbanisation. The article assesses this need in a moment of key international accords in Paris, New York and Quito. National governments...

The New Urban Agenda, being adopted at Habitat III, requires a coherent and legible global urban scientific community to provide expertise to direct and assess progress on urban sustainability transformations. As we have commented in Nature’s special section on Habitat III, the urban research community is currently institutionally marginalized and...

A United Nations conference seeks urban sustainability. But the agenda will fail without input from researchers

Getting Started with the SDGs in Cities outlines how cities can get started with implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in cities and human settlements. Effective and decisive action on sustainable development at the local level, within all cities and human settlements, is crucial to the success of Agenda 2030. Despite the key role o...

The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban...

The second edition of IIHS’ urban atlas series is entitled Urban India 2015: Evidence. The themed urban atlas covers a set of sectors: socio-spatial demographics, transport, energy, affordable housing, water supply and sanitation, urban economy, and poverty, inequality and exclusion.

Executive Summary The year 2015 presents an unparalleled opportunity to unify UN policy efforts through the convergence of three landmark UN frameworks: the post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (March 2015), the Sustainable Development Goals (September 2015) and the Climate Change Agreements (December2015). There is an urgent need to ali...

Introduction 8.1.1. Key Issues Adaptation to climate change depends centrally on what is done in urban centers, which now house more than half the world’s population and concentrate most of its assets and economic activities (World Bank, 2008; UN DESA Population Division, 2012). As Section 8.4 emphasizes, this will require responses by all levels o...

Abstract This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper...

Human interference with the climate system is occurring. [WGI AR5 2.2, 6.3, 10.3-6, 10.9] Climate change poses risks for human and natural systems (Figure TS.1). The assessment of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (WGII AR5) evaluates how patterns of risks and potential...

can be downloaded at http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/report/final-drafts/

This chapter explores the de jure and de facto impact of spatial illegality on access to rights and entitlements by urban residents in Indian cities and does so focusing on the question of access to such entitlements by residents of ‘slums’. It is structured in four parts. The first reviews debates on how to consider and define spatial informality...

Produced by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and UNESCO, and published by the OECD, the 2013 World Social Science Report represents a comprehensive overview of the field gathering the thoughts and expertise of hundreds of social scientists from around the world. This edition focuses on the transformative role of the social sciences i...

The primary objectives of the IIHS curriculum are to create for human settlements professionals, practitioners and researchers from India and other parts of the world: An interdisciplinary innovation-oriented knowledge base appropriate to the transformatory opportunities and challenges of South Asian and international settlements in the 21st centu...

Over the coming half century, India’s urban population is expected to increase from a little over 300 million to about 800 million, accounting for more than half of the nation’s total population. The country will make a historic transition from a largely rural and agrarian society to one that is predominantly urban. This will be more than just an e...

n the multiple transformations that south Asia will undergo over this century, urbanisation occupies a vexed and poorly understood position. It could be both catalysed by climate change, especially through the mechanism of drought and environ- mental disaster-induced migration; and be a catalyst of climate change via growth, consumption and emissio...

The impact of climate changes will become key economic and political questions in South Asia. Indian cities will be affected the most by these. Policies will have to be adopted in such a way that the effect is reduced in India.

In the last decades, there have been large demographic and economic changes in India, a country where one out of every six people in the world live. The major long-term trends identified in this and other reports project an increasing role for India in the global economy and, correspondingly, in resource use and emissions. However, the tools to exp...

This paper describes how the city of Panjim (capital of Goa, in India) and its wider region could meet the multiple goals that sustainable development requires – combining high quality living conditions, a successful economy, and sustainable levels of resource use and waste generation. It outlines the methodologies used and describes the changes ne...

The systemic failure in Mumbai during the deluge points to the lack of a clear appreciation of the implications of the city's hazard exposure, the vulnerabilities of its people, infrastructure and institutions and the absence of coordinated interventions to mitigate risks by a series of governments. A political framework for long-range urban infras...