FLOODING IN SOUTHEAST INDIA WORSENED BY MANMADE ISSUES OTHER THAN JUST CLIMATE CHANGE Meanwhile, in Chennai: An unusually heavy winter monsoon season led to serious flooding in the coastal Indian city earlier this month, costing hundreds of lives, disrupting local infrastructure and economic sectors, and interrupting access to food and water for millions of residents. The city’s plight precipitated discussions during the Paris Climate Conference of how the impacts of extreme weather events may be exacerbated by poor urban planning. The New Delhi-based Indian Express released a short video walking through some of the local planning issues that contributed to the catastrophic flooding — including illegal construction in floodplains or on top of filled-in water bodies, stormwater runoff infrastructure built without crucial topographic data, and valuable projects never executed at all. [Indian Express, Citylab]
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We are negatively impacting our environment in significant ways with immediate consequences, but we instead continue to pump money and political capital into the environment Yeti that is global warming. Wont it be a nice world for our children when they have an atmosphere with lower CO2, but more truly toxic pollution, oceans void of life, and 1/3 of the large mammals that their parents knew.
Most people will think this post has nothing to do with Houston. The reality is our city leaders are contributing to flooding by also not executing valuable projects.