Mumbai: Even as the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation announced plans this week to develop its own Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP) for the city, a toolkit for a different kind of CCAP was launched in Mumbai on Thursday.The Community Climate Action Plan, developed by the non-profit YUVA, is not a one-size-fits-all formula but an adaptable framework that identifies local climate vulnerabilities and builds tailored adaptation and coping measures around them.Roshni Nuggehalli, executive director of YUVA, stressed that climate action planning must be anchored in the realities of the communities most exposed to climate vulnerabilities — without that grounding, she cautioned, broad-based CAPs risk being ineffective.Having piloted the framework successfully in 2022 in Ambojwadi — an informal settlement of roughly 53,000 people in Malvani, Malad West — and later implemented it in three other informal settlements, the organisation has now launched it for public use.Unlike top-down city, state, and national climate plans, this ground-up model is led by local people’s collectives who engage local govt directly for targeted interventions.“Around 42% of Mumbai’s population of 11.8 million live in bastis, yet climate action often bypasses this large group,” said Dulari Parmar, project lead for climate justice at YUVA. “CCAPs connect neighborhood priorities with city CAPs and can complement them.” Informal settlements commonly bear the brunt of heat, flooding, rising AQI, landslides, and sea-level rise.The CCAP follows a four-step framework: climate hazard mapping, rapid assessment, community-based vulnerability assessment, and the CCAP itself, with staggered adaptation and coping measures planned across immediate, short-term, and long-term horizons. For water and heat stress in an informal settlement, an immediate measure might be cool roofs paired with strengthened water-rights advocacy, while a long-term goal could be permanent municipal water connections.The CCAP isn’t meant only for informal settlements, said Nuggehalli, but for any community looking to be proactive on climate planning.In Ambojwadi, community consultations identified flood- and sewage-prone areas caused by the absence of sewage lines and successfully advocated with BMC for drains. “We didn’t just go to the ward office with a problem — we brought solutions devised by the community itself,” Parmar says, noting that the settlement’s lack of land tenure rights often blocks access to basic civic services, even as govt has grown more receptive to climate framing.Kiran Dighavkar, associate municipal commissioner for solid waste management at BMC, acknowledged the need to integrate informal settlements more meaningfully into climate planning — but argued that community stewardship, especially around waste management, must go hand in hand with govt action. “Get people to demand segregation and processing centres in their bastis,” he said. “This too is climate action.”
