Second Climate Action Plan Workshop for CapaCITIES in Coimbatore

Through the CapaCITIES project supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the CapaCITIES IA team will develop a Climate Change Action Plan for the city of Coimbatore, with interventions to build urban resilience in the city and address both climate mitigation and climate adaptation.

As part of the series of consultative workshops to formulate the City Climate Action Plan, the second Climate Action Plan Workshop for CapaCITIES project was conducted in Coimbatore on July 27, 2017. This workshop was a Shared Learning Dialogue (SLD) with the Stakeholder Group and Climate Core Team, facilitated by ICLEI South Asia.

The workshop was inaugurated by the Municipal Commissioner of Coimbatore Dr. Vijayakarthikeyan. Mr. Alexander Luchinger introduced the CapaCITIES Project under which the workshop was being organised. Ms. Simone Butzer, a Swiss waste water management expert, who was in Coimbatore under the project to assess the waste water collection and treatment situation and provide a workplan for the restoration and rejuvenation of the lakes in the city, presented her activities as well.

The workshop was attended by representatives from the Core Team in Coimbatore Corporation, as well as from the Stakeholder Group, that included representatives from NGOs like WWF, Residents Awareness Association of Coimbatore (RAAC), No Dumping, institutes like Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History SACON, professors from colleges and universities, as well as individual experts on waste, water and sewerage. The main objectives of the workshop were to:

• Develop a list of possible resilience interventions to address the climate risks and vulnerability identified in the earlier workshop for the fragile urban systems in the city.
• Prioritise the resilience Interventions against a set of indicators to assess their resilience potential.

Ms. Bedoshruti Sadhukhan from ICLEI South Asia recapitulated the work done in the previous workshop, and the fragility systems identified as well as the risks assessed for these systems, the vulnerable areas and the vulnerable populations for each of these systems. During the workshop, the participants were divided into two groups to identify interventions for two urban systems each – one for the water and waste water sector and the other for the solid waste system and land use planning. The participants came up with a long list of interventions that can be taken up in the city to build resilience in these sectors. These interventions will now be prioritised for their resilience potential and their technical, economic and political feasibility to formulate the city climate action plan.

Mr. Ankit Bhardwaj from Centre for Policy Research (CPR), briefly presented the project that CPR will be conducting in Coimbatore with support from SDC on identifying policies that help to integrate climate and development goals.