Caught between concrete and panic, India should not maladapt to climate change

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In 2018, the Odisha government moved more than 500 families in a cluster of seven villages called Satabhaya, which the Bay of Bengal had almost entirely devoured, to a rehabilitation colony in Bagapatia. | Photo Credit: BISWARANJAN ROUT

With more than 7,500 km of coastline and millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas, India faces a dilemma that it has often been told is really a trap: use engineering solutions to hold the line, so to speak, or to beat a retreat inland. While many adaptation experts and institutions in high-income countries have favoured a ‘managed retreat’ in high-risk coastal areas, governments in South Asia have favoured concrete walls instead. But really, Indians’ best bet is an oft-unarticulated third way.

At the COP climate summits and elsewhere, India’s representatives, including its Union Environment Minister, have argued that economically developing and under-developed countries deserve an extended off-ramp regarding the use of fossil fuels because these countries cannot abruptly abandon the cheapest source of energy known without also plunging millions of people back into poverty.

There is a strong normative case to apply the same argument to coastal engineering: that using engineering to buy time is India’s developmental right.

But is it? The question arises because of social equity. That is, if a government uses its engineering off-ramp to build luxury coastal roads and high-end reclaimed cities, it is less buying time for its people and more walking into the trap of maladaptation. Put differently, engineering must not divert more investments in high-risk zones; if it does, it will only compound the catastrophe that will inevitably result as global warming continues its upward march.

For example, Nigeria has already backed a large land reclamation project dubbed the “Great Wall of Lagos”. It will protect valuable real estate and a new financial district from the Atlantic Ocean even as it diverts tidal energy to neighbouring lower-incom