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With the advent of urbanization, a lot of small cities are changing rapidly into big cities with a large density of population. Urbanization occurs mainly when rural people move to urban areas and hence, results in the growth of the size of the urban population. We can say that urbanization is a global trend which is happening all over the world and resulting in a natural increase in population. As the world’s urban population is increasing faster than the world’s population, it is creating negative impacts on the global environment. Due to rapid urbanization, our climate is also changing in recent years which has brought serious environmental problems such as global warming, flood, landslides, pollution, and cyclone. In urban areas, where the population density is high, climate change has been aggravating those vulnerabilities and causing uncountable deaths every year. Due to the significant amount of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emission, cities are at the top of any inevitable actions caused by climate change. In urban poor cities, most people migrate from rural areas to urban areas because of push factors such as employment opportunities, access to better health and social services which eventually improve standard of living. However, those urban poor people are the one who are mostly affected by the natural calamities caused by climate change. This report focuses on the urban poor in Nepal, especially in its capital Kathmandu, and how they are being affected by global environmental changes such as floods, landslides and cyclones.
Nepal is a small landlocked country having diverse climatic conditions where people suffer heavily from natural disasters every year. Despite its relatively small area, 42 percent of people living in urban areas with Kathmandu making 34 percent of whole. In the article, ‘The History of Disaster Incidents and Impacts in Nepal: 1900-2005’, Komal Raj Aryal reports that the country’s hazards include epidemics, floods, landslides and mudslides, urban and wildfires, glacier lake outbursts, wind storms, cold and heat waves, road accidents, drowning incidents, landmines, and earthquakes. People living in urban areas are mostly affected by flood and landslides due to the congested area and poor-quality infrastructure. Historically, Kathmandu is the capital city and only the primate city of Nepal where people from rural areas migrate to improve their living standards. Consequently, it is one of the fastest urbanizing cities and most at-risk cities to climate change simultaneously. However, the lack the inadequate space and poor construction housing are causing environmental degradation in Kathmandu. From the past, flood and landslide have been occurring several times a year and in recent years, it has been increased. During the period 1900-2005, there were 2740 incidents of flooding all over in Nepal which had total casualties around 7.4 million and 3.2 million lost their lives (Aryal, 151). Also, UN-Habitat in the book, ‘Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments’, states that in July 2002, 26 floods occurred in the Kathmandu Valley which took the lives of 28 people, affecting 283 people and property losses of 54,455,000 Nepalese Rupees which is around USD 545,550. Similarly, in the recent news published by the New York Times, ‘Flooding Kills Dozens in Nepal as Waters Rise Across Asia’, by Bhadra Sharma, reports that torrential weekends rains causing widespread flood and landslide has caused 69 deaths in a country, and still, some are missing. As a result, it creates negative effects on economic activities, settlements, roads and transportations, and water supply and sanitation systems. Furthermore, landslides are also common in Nepal, in fact, the second-highest after flooding in terms of death. As Kathmandu is surrounded by mountains, landslides are most likely to occur after flooding near the mountain area. According to data collected by UN-Habitat from 1971 to 2011, there has been an increasing trend of landslides and the number of deaths. There were 83 landslides inside Kathmandu valley which took lives of 104 people and also, causing a huge loss in an economy (11). People living in slum areas of Kathmandu Valley are mostly affected by flooding and landslides. UN habitat data shows that more than 31,000 slums are living in Kathmandu Valley and are vulnerable to impacts of climate change. As those affected people have lost their settlements, they are forced to live in poverty which also deprives them of getting education and health services. Even though they are living in one of the urbanized cities in the country, they might not have felt that they are living in the urban city because the problems they faced in the rural areas are same as of urban areas. On the other hand, due to the political instability of government, they could not invest in urban development as much as they needed to invest to provide quick and immediate relief in, particularly affected areas. Government has neither shown any interest to provide settlements of those urban poor people nor provided employment opportunities to get basic requirements. Therefore, ongoing rapid urbanization and risk to climate change, Nepal needs to take account of climate-proofing and resilience in urban development programs.
Generally speaking, the climate is changing every year and the main cause of global climate change is human beings. Human beings have been degrading the environment in the name of industrialization and technological development. As a result, we are facing much more negative impacts every year. The urban poor in a fast-growing city like Kathmandu will be more affected by climate change due to the unmanaged and unscientific way of urban development. Therefore, it is essential to make sustainable plans to embrace climate change adaptation since we cannot stop climate change.
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