The Limitations of a Narrow Approach
As climate change-related extreme events such as heat waves and unprecedented flooding become common, the concept of blue-green infrastructure is catching on in cities like Hyderabad. It should have been about restoring natural ecology – repairing and renewing watercourses, reviving green areas and urban forests to create resilience and reconnect these fragmented elements. However, as seen in Hyderabad, blue-green infrastructure has become a neoliberal policy of developing stable markets in ecosystem services and the economic valuation of nature.
Over the past decade, studies have identified two major challenges in Hyderabad: the rise in temperature and urban heat island effect, and changing rainfall patterns leading to near-drought conditions, large variations in precipitation, and urban flooding. These are generally attributed to the accelerated pace of land use changes and the resulting shifts in land surface cover, leading to drastic shifts in local climate. The prolonged heat waves, variability in monsoon rainfall, and hot-dry winters were also associated with El Niño/La Niña events over Telangana.
This has, in some measure, drawn attention to the role of natural ecology in cities. The revised guidelines issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs in 2015 mandate that land use planning must incorporate ‘blue-green infrastructure’, ecosystem-based approaches, and integration of resilience measures within urban planning. Subsequently, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority invited proposals for integrating blue-green infrastructure for climate-resilient urban and regional development.
The Commodification of Nature
However, this essay attempts to unpack the conceptual underpinning of blue-green infrastructure, which has caught the imagination of urbanists as a panacea to climate change events. In the dominant perspective, blue-green infrastructure is not about creating resilience or adaptive capacities of communities or ecologies critical to survival, but is a continuation of the commodification of nature through ecosystem services and carbon sinks embedded in the system. It is made possible by the systematic dismantling of environmental protections, disregarding indigenous knowledge, and displacement of communities.
To subsume nature into an economic entity, protection and conservation laws are replaced by the rhetoric of ‘carrying capacities’ for industrial planning, ‘environmental assessment’ of megaprojects, and ‘flexibility’ of pollution control boards. The blue-green infrastructure is, without doubt, a neoliberal policy of development of stable markets in ecosystem services and the economic valuation of nature.
The Myth of Resilience
Two decades of continuous branding and marketing of Hyderabad as a ‘model of development’ of economic growth and improved urban liveability for external investors and expatriate white-collar workers took a severe hit in October 2020 when the city was severely flooded due to a deep depression in the Bay of Bengal, caused by global warming of seas. While parts of the old city relied on century-old stormwater management infrastructure, the newly developed areas with vast gated communities, commercial zones of conspicuous consumption, and economic infrastructure supporting the IT and services industries were all paralyzed. This was due to inadequate underground infrastructure such as drainage systems and mismanaged land planning that did not account for water flows, topography, and zoning.
To retain the image of ‘Brand Hyderabad’, the government of Telangana quickly constituted a new department and launched a project to improve flood resilience called the Strategic Nala Development Plan (SNDP). Despite studies by various consultants, the department was primarily staffed with civil engineers who assessed existing nullahs, stormwater drains, and critical narrow points. The first phase covered 1,452 square kilometers and had 58 projects to renew 80 kilometers of nullahs at Rs 982 crore. It involved debris removal, desilting, solid waste disposal, and the establishment of several sewage treatment plants (STPs) and box drains.
The next phase was more contentious; it entailed the demolition of thousands of encroachments to widen the nullahs before transforming them into parks, walkways, and leisure and recreation zones. A similar policy is shaping the development of what the government has identified as man-made lakes, of which 185 lakes are in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area. While these lakes were originally meant to supply water, they are connected through swales and shallow drains, ultimately flowing into the Musi River and serving as flood mitigation. Besides the mitigation, the government intends to improve liveability, capture land value through ‘clean and odour-free’ lakes, and create walkways, small parks and generate new economic activities.
The Limitations of Blue-Green Approach
These projects provide an empirical understanding of the danger of relying on the narrow blue-green infrastructure approach to mitigate climate change effects in cities, as well as the inadequacy to understand that climate resilience depends on the preservation of the natural environment in cities. The compartmentalized focus on water as an isolated element in the city comes from a functional approach of preventing and managing urban flooding. Similarly, the restrictive understanding of ‘green’ in terms of a quantitative measurement of tree cover results in a flawed understanding of trees and vegetation as interchangeable units, whose role and effect is understood only through numbers.
This blue-green approach understands climate mitigation only in terms of specific problems such as flooding, pollution, heat island effects, temperature rises, and unpredictable weather patterns. These problems are addressed through functional solutions: The management of water and the planting of trees. Additionally, it has immediate harmful effects on the social fabric of vulnerable populations who inhabit these locations where the SNDP and Haritha Haram projects require their land. For instance, the demolitions of settlements along the Musi River will displace a large number of poor and render them homeless.
Secondly, the riverfront development plans to divide the 20 kilometers into three river zones – the leisure area from Outer Ring Road to the walled city as an entertainment zone neatly integrates with the existing gated communities nearby but these will be saved from demolition because of their relative position and land values.
Towards a Holistic Approach: Degrowth
The limitations of the blue-green infrastructure approach call for a shift in policy and planning to foreground the preservation of a city’s ecological system as a whole, and emphasize a more holistic interconnected web of water, soil, topography, seasonal variations, landscape, and socio-cultural factors. Such a shift will also require a change in the understanding of the environment as an integrated system, of which cities and their population are one part, rather than as commodified collections of individual water bodies and vegetation.
This will only be possible if climate mitigation policies in cities are decoupled from their role as enablers of economic growth. What we need is degrowth that recognizes the physical limits of growth, and questions the neoliberal dimensions of development. Degrowth is an invitation to be on the long journey of decolonizing our growth imaginations. It insists on deconstruction and re-evaluation of beliefs within the urban context, and the relationship between capitalism and productivism, consumerism and materialism, development and the quasi-religion of economics, science and technology.
As Herman Daly, American ecologist-economist wrote, “We have many problems – poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, climate change, financial instability but only one solution for everything, namely economic growth. We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism. It now creates more problems than it solves.” In this perspective, blue-green infrastructure is merely a neoliberal tool in the garb of ecology.
Towards a Resilient Hyderabad
The policy and planning for Hyderabad’s stormwater management must shift towards a more holistic approach that recognizes the city’s ecological system as a whole, and emphasizes the interconnected web of water, soil, topography, seasonal variations, landscape, and socio-cultural factors. This will require a fundamental change in the understanding of the environment, moving away from the commodification of natural resources and the reliance on economic growth as the primary driver of development.
A degrowth approach that recognizes the physical limits of growth and questions the neoliberal dimensions of development is essential. This will involve the deconstruction and re-evaluation of beliefs within the urban context, and the relationship between capitalism, productivism, consumerism, materialism, and the role of economics, science, and technology.
By adopting a more holistic and ecologically-grounded approach to stormwater management, Hyderabad can build true resilience to climate change-related challenges, while also addressing the social and environmental justice concerns that have been exacerbated by the narrow blue-green infrastructure approach. This will require a shift in mindset, policy, and planning, but it is a necessary step towards a more sustainable and equitable future for the city.
