Climate Leading to an Existential Challenge: AStudy of Delhi-NCR

Abstract

Climate change, one of the prominent phenomena being experienced all over the earth, is continuing since the formation of the earth and will continue for decades. Climate change is more than global warming or sea-level rise; the rise in average temperature is only one indicator of broader changes also translating into extreme temperatures, drought, flooding, storms, rising sea levels, impacts on food production and infectious diseases. A large number of legally binding human rights obligations have been agreed upon by many nations since the creation of the United Nations. Although, the concern lies not just in climate change, but in vulnerable climatic variations and rapid changes in patterns also. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has recently concluded that ‘Climate change is a human tragedy in the making. Allowing that tragedy to evolve would be a political failure that merits the description of an outrage to the conscience of mankind’. This article sets out the relevance of sustainability and climate change in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) region of India. Highlighting the multiple constraints of climate change and possessing the risk to human and potentially leading to their serious and widespread anthropogenic contribution to the increase in atmospheric CO2 and other GHGs. The article demonstrates the formation of urban heat island (UHI) over the area of Delhi NCR, footprints of urbanisation, frequent climatic changes, concretisation, and land-use conversions resulting into a threat to human health and well-being. Several international agreements on combating climate change as well as steps taken nationally to improve the environmental conditions keeping a focus on afforestation, green belt initiative, use of CNG, treatment of wastewater and light on serious damage done to Yamuna river. The recorded differential cooling and heating of various land use/cover, large temperature ranges are associated with bare land, built-up land, etc., the results suggest that methodology is feasible to estimate surface emissivity and surface temperature with reasonable accuracy over heterogeneous urban area, stating that north-south and west-east gradient of temperature demonstrates that the core of Delhi has a much lower temperature and UHI phenomenon. Extremely high-and low-temperature conditions in built-up land have direct and negative impacts on health conditions, and therefore are imperative to study. Thus, an attempt has been made in this research to analyse climatic variations and temporal differences in the city of Delhi.