Project Leader: Dr. Meenu Tewari
Research Team: Dr. Saon Ray, Dr. Indro Ray, Amrita Goldar and Zeba Aziz
Commencement: December 2014
Completion:
Funded by: Rockefeller Foundation
Building on Phase I of the Rockefeller project on Climate Change and the Competitiveness of Cities, this study drills down into two sectors to understand the institutional and political-economic dynamics of adaption. How do utilities and households in the water sector and firms in the urban industrial sector adapt to the pressures of climate change rising temperatures, uncertain precipitation and the risks of urban flooding. Adaptation is an extremely important, but incompletely understood link between a city’s capacity to build climate resilience and its capacity to meet its economic development goals. The study will use mixed methods to gather primary data and build a deeper body of institutional and political economic evidence to generate measurable insights about the economic effects of climate adaptation in Indian cities. This will contribute to two outcomes: (i) it will add to our understanding of the economic effects of climate action and to some extent, the costs of non-action; and (ii) generate methodological insights about how to carry out such research in data-scarce environments.