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Cities are at the forefront of climate action as never before: they concentrate risk but also provide opportunities to innovate. Situated at the crossroads of extensive urbanization, unequal development, and high climate vulnerability, Indian cities face an urgent imperative to adapt to current and projected climate change impacts.
Indian cities are better understood as porous nodes embedded in dynamic, complex, and risk-prone systems. For example, sprawling cities and towns draw on wider resources for food, water, and goods. Cities are made and remade by migrant labour. Urban culture mutates as the city changes in relation to the rural. And on this palimpsest of flux, climate change is another layer of change, upending the way we live, work, adapt, and aspire.
In this talk, Chandni Singh discusses her work across South Indian cities to highlight how aspirations and precarities across rural and urban areas are deeply coupled through labour migration, and that climate change is reconfiguring livelihoods and capabilities across space. This stretching of climate risks and responses across geographies and settlement types (here, rural, urban), necessitates a shift in how we build resilience in cities and villages. She also reflects on emerging conceptualizations of climate-resilient development, highlighting that without a focus on the vulnerable, and an acknowledgement of population movement, climate resilience and inclusive development will remain uneven and insufficient goals.
This event will run at 9 – 10 AM EST and 6.30 – 7.30 PM IST
About the speaker
Chandni Singh works at the interface of climate change and development in rural and urban geographies within the Global South. At Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), she works on issues of climate change adaptation, differential vulnerability and wellbeing, disaster risk and recovery, livelihoods transitions, and rural-urban migration.
She has previously worked in research and practice-based organizations such as the University of Reading (UK), Bioversity International (Italy), Pragya, and WWF India across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. She has taught postgraduate level courses on climate change adaptation, sustainability, research methodology, and development studies. She is also interested in science communication for lay audiences and is a published poet.
*The link to the event will be sent out 24 hours prior
