Title: Capacity building of Indian cities on urban climate change resilience

Biography:

Bhavna Vimawala is an architect from CEPT- Ahmedabad & Masters in Planning. An active academician since 22 years, a professor at Faculty of Architecture., SCET, Surat India, She has received many awards ‘Aqua Foundation’s Excellence Award 2017, IIA Award for Excellence in Architecture 2015 for Research Studies, BEST Papers PORTUS plus journal of RETE Publisher, Venice in 2016 & 2017. She was invited by Asian University Network Forum on Advances in Research AUNFAIR 2018 at Nagoya, JAPAN and invited to participate in the Eu Funded Erasmus +KA-107 Mobility Program at Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (Spain)-UPCT.

Abstract

The cities across the globe face long-term challenges in ensuring the well-being of their inhabitants. With cities growing, the problems are also growing. More population pressure leads to intensive resource use and damage to the environment. These challenges are impact of climate change and are often compounded by pre-existing vulnerability. Urban resilience is the capacity of cities to function, so that the people living in cities survive and bounce back no matter what stresses or shocks they encounter. Thus, it is important to build up and strengthen national, regional and community level capacity. This particular paper highlights the attempts carried out to improve the resilience of climate change by strengthening the capacity building of identified six Indian cities (Bharuch, Bhavnagar, Jodhpur, Aurangabad, and Kolhapur Ujjain in different states of India) on urban climate change resilience city. The objective was to exchange information on capacity building along with knowledge networking among the Urban Local Bodies on UCCR. The aim was to generate debate that may help to arrive at contextualize options for the policies and impart knowledge to educate the aspirants that they can further implement the learning in their cities and put in practice. Here the solution couldn’t only be drafting of plans and coming up with ideas. But any successful implementation of the plans requires effective collaboration from root to top. Also one solution fits all concepts could prove to be inefficient in coping up with the climate change problem. Local  conditions are to be studied before implementing any plan, there are absolutely no boundaries to climate change, the best way to prevent its worsen effects is by being prepared and also being sensitive towards nature is the need of the hour.