Context: 

Torrential rains in several parts of north India, particularly Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, damaged various infrastructures and took hundreds of lives. 

• While a warming Arctic is said to be a cause for the unusually heavy rains, years of haphazard planning and construction have multiplied the tragedy. 

Are natural disasters man-made?

• High Frequency & Intensity: The frequency and intensity of hazards have increased, and anthropogenic climate change has played a major role in that. 
• No Sustainability: Humans have built on floodplains, encroached water bodies, and planned cities without thinking about sustainability. 
• High Movement: The movement of people to urban centers has affected natural landscapes. 
  • Some landscapes have changed drastically and exceeded their carrying capacity that exacerbated the extent of loss and damage in these areas.
• Increased Population Density: It means greater dependence on fossil fuel and greater climate-disruptive anthropogenic forces.

Concerns:

• Not adequate planning for the kind of sea-level rise expected and the coastal inundation projected in the coming decades.
• Lack of awareness
• Ignoring a risk or the risk is not clearly estimated or defined before implementing a new infrastructure project
• Risk is underestimated because of lack of a complete record that informs planners about current and upcoming disasters. 
• Also, available data sets are often pretty old and do not directly provide sufficient information about the future. 

The Path Ahead:

• Adopting the Sustainable Development Goals
• Implementing careful urban planning
  • Creating roads and streets keeping sustainable planning in mind
• Need to think about long-term risk assessments, vulnerability assessments, and understand how socioeconomic drivers are worsening the problem in certain communities compared to others in the city
• Need for strict implementation of the associated laws
• Need to analyze the implications of imposing a strict carrying capacity in certain regions
• Not allowing for more urbanization to happen in certain areas or restricting certain ways in which infrastructure is built
• To make the right decisions, collaboration of experts from both private and public agencies and to focus on current and modern ways of understanding the scale of a disaster is desired
• Need to build stronger systems from the bottom up and learn to do it collectively
• Learn from others’ practices.
  • Example: In Mumbai, we have seen floods viscerally and the city has continued to grow. 
    • Mumbai has its own Disaster Management Agency and has been engaging with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology to predict floods better. 
    • The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s storm-water drainage department built larger water-holding tanks. 

News Source: The Hindu