Search for: All records

Urbanization in the global South is intricately linked with the internal mobility of people and the impacts of climate change. In India, changing precipitation patterns pose pressure on rural livelihoods through the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, contributing to rural-to-urban mobility. At destination, however, insufficient information is available on the complex mobility backgrounds of the new arrivals. We employ a mixed methods approach to investigate mobility patterns to Pune, India, with a special focus on the role of droughts. Combining a household survey with in-depth interviews and monthly precipitation data on district level, we use descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis to show a significant relationship between drought at origin and mobility to Pune. Particularly affected are recent arrivals, migrants of rural origin and from other states, and those currently living in informal areas. The link between droughts and mobility decisions is usually indirect, hidden behind economic conditions such as the loss of agricultural jobs. Paradoxically, migrants affected by droughts at origin face increased flood risk at destination. This risk, however, is often consciously taken in favor of better livelihood opportunities in the city. With climate scenarios projecting increasingly variable precipitation patterns, understanding the climate-mobility-urbanization nexus gains importance, especially for destination hotspots like the city of Pune. 

Emerging megacities in the global south face unprecedented transformation dynamics, manifested in rapid demographic, economic, and physical growth. Anticipating the associated sustainability and resilience challenges requires an understanding of future trajectories. Global change models provide consistent high-level urbanization scenarios. City-scale urban growth models accurately simulate complex physical growth. Modeling approaches linking the global and the local scale, however, are underdeveloped. This work introduces a novel approach to inform a local urban growth model by global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways to produce consistent maps of future urban expansion and population density via cellular automaton and dasymetric mapping. We demonstrate the approach for the case of Pune, India. Three scenarios are explored until 2050: business as usual (BAU), high, and low urbanization. After calibration and validation, the BAU scenario yields a 55% growth in Pune’s population and 90% in built-up extent, entailing significant impacts: Pune’s core city densifies further with up to 60,000 persons/km2, adding pressure to its strained infrastructure. In addition, 66–70% more residents are exposed to flood risk. Half of the urban expansion replaces agriculture, converting 167 km2 of land. The high-urbanization scenario intensifies these impacts. These results illustrate how spatially explicit scenario projections help identify impacts of urbanization and inform long-term planning. 

Systems models of the Food–Water–Energy (FWE) nexus face a conceptual difficulty: the systematic integration of local stakeholder perspectives into a coherent framework for analysis. We present a novel procedure to co-produce and systematize the real-life complexity of stakeholder knowledge and forge it into a clear-cut set of challenges. These are clustered into the Pressure–State–Response (PSIR) framework, which ultimately guides the development of a conceptual systems model closely attuned to the needs of local stakeholders. We apply this approach to the case of the emerging megacity Pune and the Bhima basin in India. Through stakeholder workshops, involving 75 resource users and experts, we identified 22 individual challenges. They include exogenous pressures, such as climate change and urbanization, and endogenous pressures, such as agricultural groundwater over-abstraction and land use change. These pressures alter the Bhima basin’s system state, characterized by inefficient water and energy supply systems and regional scarcity. The consequent impacts on society encompass the inadequate provision with food, water, and energy and livelihood challenges for farmers in the basin. An evaluation of policy responses within the conceptual systems model shows the complex cause–effect interactions between nexus subsystems. One single response action, such as the promotion of solar farming, can affect multiple challenges. The resulting concise picture of the regional FWE system serves resource users, policymakers, and researchers to evaluate long-term policies within the context of the urban FWE system. While the presented results are specific to the case study, the approach can be transferred to any other FWE nexus system.