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A recent report by World Wide Fund for Nature a hundred cities worldwide, including 30 in India, face the risk of ‘severe water scarcity’ by 2050.

Report Highlights

• The cities would face a ‘grave water risk’ by 2050 due to a dramatic increase in their population percentage to 51 per cent by 2050, from 17 per cent in 2020.
• The cities include global hubs such as Beijing, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Mecca and Rio de Janeiro.
• Thirty Indian cities are also included in the list.
• More than half of the identified cities are from China and India.

What cities need to do?

• Cities needed to invest more in nature-based solutions and enhance the health of river basins, watersheds and wetlands to build resilience to water risks.
• To manage these initiatives, a public funding pool needed to be created in collaboration with the private sector to invest, reduce risk and generate returns and fuel sustainable economic growth.
• Cities also needed to support greater global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions to avoid reaching these scenarios.
• To re-evolve and re-imagine their future, Indian cities needed to break away from the current set of issues by looking into developing more of nature-based solutions.

About India, the WWF said Indian cities needed to re-evolve and re-imagine their future and needed to break away from the current set of issues by looking into developing more of nature-based solutions.

• WWF also launched an online tool called the WWF Water Risk Filter to help cities imagine future water risks and plan a better and sustainable future facilitating climate and water resilience.

Source: DTE